>The future of flight shouldn’t be things with propellers and turbines<p>Why not? Modern turbofans and constant speed, variable pitch propellers are very high efficiency. According to the linked paper, the thrust it can produce is directly proportional to atmospheric density so you'll struggle to produce usable thrust at altitude and just guessing there's practical limitations of how high you can crank the voltage before breakdown and arching become problems. Not to mention that grid of wires looks very high drag at any kind of real speed. I'd wager you get longer range out of an electrically driven ducted fan.