Comment Re:Carbon neutral aviation biofuel ... (Score 1) 160
There are other advantages to electric engines besides the pollution aspect.
For one, they're much quieter, which is one of the major problems with modern air transportation. The engines are also a lot simpler, reducing maintenance costs and risk of failure during flight.
Electricity is also a much more versatile form of energy than combustibles, since we know how to generate it from almost every other energy form.
Imagine a hybrid electric plane. You could charge it at the airport and take off on battery power. Then recharge the batteries during flight and land on electric power again. Just by doing that you enormously decrease air and sound pollution near urban areas.
It might even be feasible to install solar panels in the plane surfaces to get a bit of extra efficiency going (not sure it'd be worth it, just throwing the idea in).
Or install a wind turbine at the back - the faster you fly, the more energy you generate!
But seriously, the use of electric engines to power aircraft is the most interesting knowledge coming out of this prototype. I doubt that Airbus can contribute much to the current research on battery storage, but electric flight might be advantageous even if you're powering it with gas generators for the most part.
As technology evolves, you start to rely less and less on the generators until you can remove them completely.