Electric airplanes will hit the market in 3-5 years, Rob Wallace, president of Rolls-Royce’s EV division predicted.
Rolls-Royce is working on its own model of fully-electric aircraft. The company’s engineers have developed a 600 kilowatt per hour battery electric system. It will enable flying six to eight people as far as 80 nautical miles (148 km). Improvements in battery technology may eventually allow the plane to fly as much as 400 kilometers (250 miles) in the 2030s. “We are confident in the technology. Now we need to scale it so it can have a meaningful economic influence,” Wallace said.
Nevertheless, he noted that the most popular Airbus and Boeing models could not be converted to electric power. “If you want to fly hundreds of people and thousands of miles, which is the single-aisle market, a battery is never going to do that because you’ll just be limited by the energy density of a battery and the weight of the battery,” Wallace commented.
