Driving west on Highway 20 in Skagit County, Washington, you’ll come to a billboard just outside the town limits of Anacortes. A small plane soars through the sky, with the message ‘if you’d flown, you’d be there by now’. For the weekend vacationer to the San Juan Islands, about to pay more than $40 to sit for hours in the ferry line, the billboard’s $98 ad price is a bit of a taunt.

Fuel efficiency is a hot topic right now as we explore the range and capacity of our technologies to better burn fuel. Innovators such as Klaus Savier of Light Speed Engineering, are working on making planes with the fuel efficiency of an electric car.

Savier has been modifying his Vari-EZ plane over the course of his career to become an innovation in fuel efficiency and speed.

The Vari-EZ is equipped with a 30 gallon tank, enough gas to get Savier from Southern California to Oshkosh, WI (1,522nm) and Panama City, FL (1,700nm) without stopping for a refill. The key to this incredible fuel efficiency lies in a web of aeronautic technojargon, but my sense is that updated technology and specially tweaked equipment would be the layman terms.

With a small plane getting 50-100 miles/gallon fuel efficiency, we’re looking at the potential for another piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Electric car battery life is a problem for long distance journeys – could that problem be solved with small, fuel efficient planes straight out of a Tyco designbook?