http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/10/wired-flys-e-spyder-electric-plane/all/1

I’m about 600 feet above the Connecticut countryside, looking out
over the fall colors of the valley below. I’m in the small, open cockpit of an
ultralight with a stick in my right hand, rudder pedals at my feet and what
feels like a throttle lever in my left hand.

But as much as the E-Spyder feels like a normal light aircraft, I have to remind
myself that I’m flying an electric airplane. A prototype electric airplane, one
that only a handful of people in the world have flown. Tom Peghiny, the creator
of this amazing aircraft, is watching anxiously from the ground, so I resist the
urge to turn south and follow the ridge tops. Instead I stay close to the
airport.

Electric flight is in its infancy. Only a handful of electric aircraft have ever
flown, and beyond the designers, only a few other pilots have experienced the
pleasure — and it is a pleasure — of flying purely on battery power. With that
short list in mind, when Peghiny offered, I jumped at the opportunity to fly one
of the only electric airplanes currently flying anywhere in the world.

Of course the current range of an electric airplane doesn’t make the technology
a practical replacement for traditional small aircraft. But to focus on range is
to miss the point. As of now, flying an electric airplane isn’t about going
somewhere, just as flying an airplane in the decade after the Wright brothers
first flight wasn’t about going somewhere.

It’s about the possibilities ahead.