Don’t conflate rockets and airplanes. Most of the energy an airplane uses is to overcome parasitic drag – to overcome the air resistance caused by moving forwar

Don’t conflate rockets and airplanes. Most of the energy an airplane uses is to overcome parasitic drag – to overcome the air resistance caused by moving forward through the air mass. While some of the energy is used to keep the plane in the air, that is not dominant. Yes, planes have a higher maximum takeoff weight then maximum landing weight, but that has to do with the design of the landing gear, in some hypothetical world where jet fuel did not shed weight, planes would only have slightly worse range. The real problem with electric aviation is that batteries have terrible weight to energy ratios compared to fossil fuels.