Battery technology improvements are expected to soon enable electric flight and companies in the field are preparing their powertrain technology to support it. In a major move toward that goal, Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Siemens have announced a new partnership to gradually convert a plane to electric propulsion. The project they are collaborating on is the ‘E-Fan X’, a BAe 146 plane on which they are testing their electric motor technology. During ground tests, they already replaced one of the four gas turbines by a two-megawatt electric motor. Paul Eremenko, Airbus’s CTO, commented on the pr…