Maeve develops the first 44-seat fully electric airplane. It will have an initial range of 460km, which can be increased over time with improved battery technology.
The aviation industry has few options to decarbonize. Electric planes are the most obvious and cheap solution. Here is a good paper by BloomberNEF on this topic, and here a paper "Comparison of conventional and electric passenger aircraft for short-haul flights – A life cycle sustainability assessment"
An interesting table comparing various solutions for decarbonization of aircraft:
In row "Econ." you can see a comparison of the cost per passenger 100km. If you compare the column "Ker" (for Kerosene, current technology) with the last coumn "Elec-RE" (electric plane with renewable electricity), you see that the latter option is already cheaper. We just need to design and build fully electric planes, which is what Maeve is doing.
I invested in Maeve in July 2023, as I am fully behind their purpose and impressed with their founders and management team.