can carry nine passengers up to 250 miles...It’s not clear yet that this transition will be possible for much larger passenger jetliners, but short- and medium-range planes could make the switch with much less pain.

It's an interesting proof of concept, but like EVs, it's not going to scale well to larger vehicles. We need significantly better battery tech (e.g. maybe the solid state lithium batteries Toyota and others are working on) to make that a reality.

Hybrid aircraft are certainly interesting though, and I think hybrid in general is the way to go. Electricity is generally better at acceleration (i.e. takeoffs), and fossil fuels have lower weight per unit of energy so they're better for sustained power (e.g. cruising altitude). I'm a huge fan of hybrid cars, and think they're way better than EVs for transitioning. You don't need to give up range, yet you get better fuel economy. However, my understanding is that we're talking like 5% better fuel economy, not 30-50% as in cars, so it's going to be a marginal improvement.

Lifting a bunch of heavy stuff into the air is always going to be more costly energy-wise than moving it along land. So we should be focusing on fast ground transportation instead of more efficient air transportation because we already have good solutions for ground transportation (high speed rail, bullet trains, etc) and just need to pay the upfront cost to get it off the ground (ha!). Aviation imo should be limited to things that need to be fast, and rail should be out main form of long distance transportation.