Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. "Tiny" aircraft by airline standards are things like turboprop passenger craft [1]. A single digit number of seats is much more niche than regional flights. It's limited to island hopping and bush flying in remote areas - a much more limited market than regional flights. 2 hours of labor split 9 ways instead of 90 ways increases your labor cost by an order of magnitude. And again, it's unclear if that electric plane could even lift 9 passengers - it's just a plane with 9 seats, there was no mention as to whether or not the mass of passengers in those seats were simulated with a load.
Scaling up would make it more efficient, but batteries' limitations prevent larger planes. Hence, why more energy dense fuels are required.
The earlier point remains that if that economics flips and rather than doing 3 hour-ish flights of 50-100 people between modest "hubs" you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades.
(In some cases you light them back up because earlier periods of passenger flight did have less hub-and-spoke/deep centralization and a lot more airports and airfields overall than are in operation today.)
I'm not sure it is going to happen, but I wouldn't underestimate the potential there either just because it doesn't look like the status quo. That's kind of the definition of "disruption".
> you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades
And my point is that this isn't going to be remotely possible without order-of-magnitude improvements in battery technology. The economics of a 9 seater aircraft flying 30 minutes in what a car can cover in an hour is just terrible. Remember, that plane was flying slowly and didn't even climb over 2,500 feet. With no passenger load either, probably. The amount of energy it'd take to carry a load with passengers in a 30 to 1 hour flight at normal cruising speed is vastly greater than what is capable with batteries.
The existing lithium ion batteries are already approaching or exceeding 50%. Just like how there's only so much energy you can get out of a kilogram of gasoline, there's only so much energy you can store in a kilogram of a lithium battery (different chemistries like LiFePo have different thermodynamic limits, but they all have a hard physical limit). A battery powered plane would have to have a different battery chemistry, the thermodynamics of the best battery chemistry we know of is too constrained. "Pick a new chemistry" is way easier said than done. Why haven't we just picked a new combustible fuel chemistry that doesn't emit greenhouse gases?
And in a sense, you're right that battery powered planes are the future: hydrogen is that new battery chemistry. The energy density by mass and volume of compressed or liquid H2 is much greater than lithium batteries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...
First you read the chart wrong the volumetric energy density of compressed hydrogen is lower, liquid hydrogen had it’s own set of huge problems. Volumetric issues are huge for aircraft as larger volume means more drag which reduces the utility of all that energy.
Anyway, your comparing hydrogen ignoring the loss factor of engines, and the weight of fuel tanks so the useful energy density is much lower. “High-pressure tanks weigh much more than the hydrogen they can hold. The hydrogen may be around 5.7% of the total mass,[19] giving just 6.8 MJ per kg total mass for the LHV” At an overly generous hypothetical engine efficiency of * 50% that’s ~= 3.4 MJ per kg.
New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries. Aluminum isn’t quite up to the hype, but it is very promising for aircraft.
> First you read the chart wrong the volumetric energy density of compressed hydrogen is lower,
No, you read the chart wrong: Hydrogen gas at atmospheric pressure - as in not compressed - has worse energy density by volume. Hydrogen at 700 bar has ~5x the energy per liter than lithium ion batteries at liquid hydrogen 10x. And all of these have energy densities by mass that are 100x better than lithium ion battery or more.
> New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries.
Such as? You gave the example of aluminum, but as you point out they have problems that inhibit practical use: namely corrosion of electrolytes. The point remains: lithium ion is the best battery chemistry we've yet found and even it is far, far from up to the task of powering an aircraft.
Labor costs are a non issue because the flights are so short. 2 hours of labor from people making 90k split 9 ways is 10$.
And of course scaling up makes aircraft more efficient so you could get a slightly longer range from a 50 or 200 seat variant.
The reasonable target with current technology and fuel reserves seems to be about 300 miles, which covers a surprising fraction of all trips.