Given this ancestry, perhaps what makes NASA's newly announced X-plane, the X-57 Maxwell, so striking is that the concept is built around what's kind of just a normal-ass general aviation airplane. Its kin may be found among workaday Cessna flight trainers just as much as the myriad delta-wing jet-powered bombers filling out the ranks of the X-plane program. In fact, the plane itself will be nothing more than a Tecnam P2006T, what's been described as an "entry level" twin-engine aircraft.
The X-57, however, will have been a bit modified. For one thing, the design has 14 engines, not two. And it will run entirely on electricity, hence the "Maxwell" (for James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who theorized electromagnetic radiation). It will have no room for passengers or cargo or much of anything besides a pilot—the interior will be almost completely occupied by huge, heavy batteries (800 pounds).

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