Hi, this is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Matthew Kenyon. Today, as you can hear,

we're talking flying and how aviation can make itself more sustainable. Most people would agree

that if you can fly emission electrically, then you should fly it electrically. So it will be the best

from an environmental perspective. The only thing is up to now it was limited to small planes

and short distances. Just how far could a battery-powered plane carry enough people to make it

commercially viable? The answer has always seemed to be not far enough, but one company thinks that's wrong.

You don't have to believe that we're going to make this plane, but we want you to believe that

the industry had overlooked something and actually more was possible.

There are other ways to make flying less bad for the environment, But if electric airliners are a possibility,

what needs to happen to make them a reality?

So how fast will it come and how big will the first step be?

And how do we make sure that investment is aligned with that?

Can the future of commercial flight really be electric? That's Business Daily from the BBC.

Today for Business Daily, I've come to visit Rotterdam, the Hague airport in the Netherlands.

There are flights from here today heading to London, Milan and Barcelona, amongst plenty of other destinations.

And all those flights and the tens of thousands of others around the world,

taking off every day, long haul or short hops will be powered by engines burning fuel and emitting carbon.

You can smell the jet fuel in the air here.

As the world tries to reduce its consumption of fossil fuels, aviation is literally a growing problem. The issue at the moment is that we make

aircraft more sustainable. Every year, the fleet average becomes more fuel efficient by one,

one and a half percent. However, aviation growth by three to four percent.

So at the moment it is a diverging problem.

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