Photo: Par Joseph de Carme 

Fasten your seat belts, make sure the tables are stowed and locked into upright position, and check the batteries for charging.

Batteries?

This addition to the preflight checklist could become reality within a decade if entrepreneurial dreams of electric airliners take flight.

Zunum Aero, together with JetBlue and Boeing, has revealed plans of building a group of electric planes that could accommodate 10 to 50 passengers on a 700-mile flight.

Zunum intends to use less-utilized airports situated in the U.S.in order to offer a more efficient air-bus service focused on regional travel.The company says it hopes to begin flying commercially by the early 2020s.

Zunum competes with Wright Electric, another company that has revealed its plan of building electric planes.Wright plans to produce larger aircraft that can carry 150 people on a 300-mile journey.

The company aims to start flying the aircraft within 10 years.

Attempts to build all-electric planes are nothing new.Boeing is running an ongoing experiment on a gliderlike light aircraft powered by batteries.Airbus is testing a completely battery-operated two-seater known as E-Fan.

Both Zunum and Wright are counting on improved batteries to power their planes.Current fuel cells are too weak and too heavy to make their planes viable.

But batteries are evolving quickly, and the companies are betting improved fuel cells will appear in time to bring their electric-flight dreams into reality.

If not, the companies could always resort to Plan B and use hybrid technology for their first-generation planes.

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