Electrical aviation is starting to look like a serious business opportunity; especially for short haul. The premise is very similar to electrical cars: they are a lot simpler to manufacture, the electricity is comparatively cheap (and getting cheaper), the maintenance cost is much lower, and they are a lot simpler and cheaper to operate.

I see a lot of articles pointing out that this does not scale to large aircraft due to various physical constraints. This is both true and irrelevant. The only reason large aircraft exist is that they make better use of a very expensive resource: fuel. Because of their size, they need big airports as well, which is why we have the hub and spoke model where most long distance travel requires traveling to a hub before you can start your journey to another hub where you hop on another spoke (unless the hub was your destination). This makes an already expensive journey even more expensive because you are forced to burn fuel to get to a place from where you can start your journey.

This problem completely goes away with electrical aviation. Big electrical airplanes would still be nice to have. But they are not essential. Mass produced small electrical planes enable people to fly from tiny airstrips; even roof tops if you consider planes with vtol capabilities. The Eviation has enough range (650 miles) that it can compete with most short haul flights.

I live in Germany. This plane can easily service the whole of Germany and many destinations outside of it as well. Better still, it can actually fly to any of the dozens of airports in Germany rather than only the handful of bigger airports that are currently taking most of the domestic travel (e.g. Berlin-Munich is a busy route). This massively improves how quickly you get from any point in Germany to any other point in Germany. It actually competes with both trains and planes for price and speed. A lot of domestic flights here compete on both with high speed rail.

Here's some back of the envelope math. The price of 1 airbus A319 (~110M) pays for around 30-35 Eviations (~3M). An A319 transports carries 160 passengers, 30 eviations can carry 270 passengers. A typical journey for the Eviation will be a fraction of what it cost to fly a single A319. It's tens vs. thousands of euros, i.e. two orders of magnitude. You can fly hundreds of eviations over the same distance for the same price as a single A319 journey (excluding the pilots). The main cost bottleneck is actually the pilots: there won't be enough of them and they cost a lot per hour.

That is of course until we automate them away, which is likely to start happening over the next decades. IMHO this will happen with electrical planes first because they are much simpler to automate. And of course, autonomously flying planes are another thing Eviation is working on.

It's a very logical strategy. I can be off by quite a large factor with these numbers and it would still be an extremely compelling business case. IMHO my numbers are long term actually extremely conservative and there is room for an order of magnitude improvement just through cost savings, already validated research around batteries, etc.

This first generation electrical plane completely destroys the business case for one of the most economical traditional planes flying today. As soon as they start producing this plane in volume, planes like the A319 are a thing of the past. I predict many traditional planes shipping today will be retired years or decades ahead of their currently scheduled end of life for this reason.