> Even if they could pack this much energy on board, flying that much weight 200km is almost certainly going to take more than 300kWh, especially with 7 passeng

> Even if they could pack this much energy on board, flying that much weight 200km is almost certainly going to take more than 300kWh, especially with 7 passengers. The Pipistrel Alpha Electro can fly 2 people more than 100km today, with an aircraft that's not at all optimised for electric flight. The battery pack is 21kWh. Increasing that to 200km seems entirely reasonable with a more optimised design and newer battery technology. Let's say you could fly 2 people 200km with a 50kWh pack, then you can by definition fly 12 people 200km with a 300kWh pack. Trade 4 people for the trade-offs needed for VTOL, and you're down to 8. > but they're counting on advancements in battery tech that are unlikely to happen in the timeframe they need Are they? They're using Zenlabs batteries, which claims to have already been verified their energy/power densities with a third party laboratory. Question is as always if plans for mass manufacturing works out. Seems like they're assuming numbers that are entirely reasonable for early mass manufacturing within the next 5 years. With the amount of money pouring into battery R&D, and the number of companies now in trial production phase with next generation cells, it seems more or less inevitable to me. They can afford to pay more for the batteries than mass-market BEV companies. So it's also not unreasonable to assume they'll be able to buy batteries at the early stage of manufacturing. > This says nothing about how fast they can recharge those massive batteries. Charging these in 40minutes would take at most 500kW (I'm assuming 250kWh charged at 2C rate). Often it'd be much less (not always going to fly its full range). We have plenty of charging stations around me with way more total power than that. Chargers running at up to 350kW is already being built routinely. So you just need two of those, and they are usually built in pairs already. This is really not going to be a major issue at all in the initial phase. Maybe down the line when they've already built out the easiest locations, it could be a bigger challenge. But nothing bigger than the mass electrification of cars and trucks. The economics of the charging stations will be better than with BEV stations, since they'll be built on fixed routes, and have high utilisation during the daytime. Doesn't feel like the skepticism passes the back of the napkin calculation tests. It's definitely within the realm of possibility. Hard? Yes, very, but if it was easy someone else would already have done it, as with all new development. If you're going to be skeptical, at least look at the numbers of what's being done today, and see how far what they require is from that.