Electric Airliners? Don’t Plan Your Trip Yet

“Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle!” was once the first idea every student learned—or at least heard—in Marketing 101. When the phrase was coined in the 1930s by Elmer Wheeler, it was accepted that there actually was a steak involved somewhere. Elmer would have swooned in the internet and social media age when even the sizzle is a figment of some bloodless, generative AI’s analysis of what’s certain to drive clicks.

In my experience, meetings with marketing people were like careening down a mountain road in my first car, a 1956 Bel Air with brakes that were mostly imaginary. You knew the wreck was just a matter of time and distance. Those of us who weren’t in marketing never knew quite what to say or do because, well, what if they were right? Thus was proven that marketing and sales in their outer reaches are really nothing but self-gaslighting. (Flagellation is also a word choice here but again, they could be right.)

This week’s story that Scandinavian Airlines is accepting reservations for seats on electric airliners shows that marketing still operates with weak brakes and an amusing lack of restraint. Reincarnated, Mr. Wheeler would be a happy gate agent in the brave new electric world. SAS has, by the way, sold all of the seats.

The target year is 2028. To its credit, SAS admits on its website that none of this is guaranteed, they don’t have an airplane that’s anywhere near flyable, and although they claim to have many initiatives underway, details are non-existent. To call the economics vaporous is to be generous.

Then why do this? Why offer something that’s so far in the future as to be a fantasy? Elmer Wheeler would nod knowingly, but SAS’s answer is an unsurprising and unswerving commitment to sustainable aviation. Fair enough. As I’ve pointed out before, this technology has to start somewhere. It’s unreasonable to expect it to emerge fully formed in an instant. It’s just as unreasonable to expect all of it to succeed or for all of it to fail.

But it always chaps me a little to see electric aviation companies—and maybe airlines, too—snowing the public by allowing them to assume this stuff is going to work and it’s just around the corner. That’s what selling tickets does, if you ask me. (You didn’t, but I’m compelled to offer an opinion.) The middle part of the aviation bell curve is populated by conservative skeptics, but it’s weighted toward the ingrate end. I’m in the middle somewhere edging toward the Unicorn band, but even I have my limits.

Every new thing needs forward-looking promotion to generate excitement for the future. Otherwise, we would be mired in the status quo. As optimistic as I am about electric airplanes, I don’t see electric airliners as a practical option for the foreseeable future, including Airbus’ ZEROe hydrogen technology. What’s driving these things is the race for low emissions. Airbus would allow you to think it’s zero emissions but the materials, electricity generation and hydrogen production all have a carbon budget. The investment to drive those emissions down will compete with fossil fuels for quite some time to come and fossil fuels have a definite economic advantage, at least for now. Sustainable aviation fuel will actually reduce that advantage and for the short term, it won’t help with emissions either, because SAF production hasn’t reached efficient scale.

One of SAS’s options is the Heart Aerospace ES-30 four-engine electric airliner, which the company claims will be in service by 2028. It will supposedly have a range of 120 miles with 30 passengers. But the company has no flying prototype, just a website with press releases. The aircraft is battery operated with turbogenerators either for backup or range extension. There is such a yawning gap between the ES-30’s on-paper performance and an extant turboprop that it will take an airline deeply committed to emissions reduction to pay more for it and get a lot less.

I’m willing to be proven wrong and Scandinavia may be just the region to do that. Consider this: In Norway, 80 percent of new car sales are EVs; 20 percent of all cars on the road are electric. And this is a country that produces a lot of oil to the tune of 4.3 percent of GDP. In Sweden, 62 percent of new sales are EVs, in Denmark it’s 50 percent, in Finland it’s 18 percent. In the U.S., for 2022, it was 5.6 percent.

Of course, any major transport aircraft program has to be launched with a world market in mind and with long legs over multiple years. This will be a persistent risk for companies, making me wonder if these projects are mainly throwaway technology incubators meant to develop something that eventually works and no actual type certificate is envisioned. Nothing new about that.

I doubt if I’ll be around long enough to buy a ticket on an electric airliner. But if I am and the damn thing can carry drinks for the passengers, I'll raise one to Elmer Wheeler.