These aircraft may work as trainers because training aircraft come back to home base the majority of the time. This doesn’t solve any type of GA point to point transportation though until infrastructure is built out to accommodate charging. Land at any FBO today and they’re going to laugh you away if you ask for an electrical cord that charges these large batteries in any meaningful amount of time. Your product may be killer (Tesla Model S) but don’t expect any kind of uptake without the support infrastructure (arguably Tesla’s number one strategic move).
Battery swapping and offline charging has not been successful in the automotive realm, but it might be a pretty reasonable alternative for aircraft. Even cheap aircraft are so expensive that the overhead of having two sets of batteries wouldn't make that much difference on the overall price, and you could probably rely on a shared pool of batteries anyway, since a lot of light aircraft aren't flown that much.
If battery swapping works then that also opens up some interesting possibilities like aluminum-air batteries that have much greater energy densities than lithium-ion batteries but which aren't rechargeable.
I don’t disagree that there are many solutions to the problem. The issue isn’t a lack of solutions though. It’s a lack of implementation. Swappable batteries sound great but does say Million Air FBO at Chicago MDW have swappable batteries for my aircraft? If someone wants to really make a dent in this market they need to follow Tesla and build out the product and the infrastructure to make it practical. I have yet to see anyone come up with big enough investment to do that.
