Reply To: General thought on old coal mines.

[Breakable]

Tulse wrote: Commercial aircraft operate between extremely well-equipped points, so there is really no reason that they have to carry their power generation actually on board — they could more easily be run on batteries that are swapped out between flights, or (as has been pointed out before), powered with conventional jet engines using synthetically-produced fuel. Successful and cheap FF will be a game changer, but it doesn’t have to be directly used to have that effect — no one is going to drive a FF-powered car, and there’s no real reason to use FF in jets. (It makes far more sense for vehicles like ships and submarines, where travel times are very long, and space, where refueling isn’t really much of an option.)

Short term (5-10 years) – probably you are right.
But for long term (10-50 years) I don’t see why such a cool idea as a plane that needs no refueling would be passed out.
Maybe we are solving a problem that does not exist, but in a resource unconstrained world that might be a habit.