An electric aircraft is an aircraft powered by electricity, almost always via one or more electric motors which drive propellers. Electricity may be supplied by a variety of methods, the most common being batteries or solar cells.
Electrically powered model aircraft have been flown since the 1970s or possibly earlier. They have since developed into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones, which in the twenty-first century have become widely used for many purposes.
Although crewed flights in an electrically-powered tethered helicopter go back to 1917 and in airships to the previous century, the first crewed free flight by an electrically powered aeroplane, the MB-E1, was not made until October 1973 and most crewed electric aircraft today are still only experimental prototypes. Between 2015 and 2016, Solar Impulse 2 completed a circumnavigation of the Earth using solar power. More recently, interest in electric passenger aircraft has grown, for both commercial airliners and personal air vehicles.