The blue glowing jets of science fiction spacecraft came a step closer to reality on Wednesday as U.S. physicists unveiled the world's first solid-state airplane powered in flight by supercharged air molecules.

More than a century on from the Wright brothers' first artificial flight, scientists hailed the "historic" test of the new technology, which could eventually slash greenhouse-gas emissions from aviation.

Ever since Orville and Wilbur Wright's momentous glide in the winter of 1903, aircraft have been driven by propellers or jets that must burn fuel to create the thrust and lift needed for sustained flight.

A team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to unlock a process known as electroaerodynamics, previously never seen as a plausible way to power an aircraft.

They were able to fly the new plane, with a wingspan of five meters, a distance of 55 meters at a speed of 4.8 meters-per-second.

The MIT airplane doesn't have any propellers or solar panels – or any movable parts whatsoever.

It involves a series of thin wires at the front of the plane that generates a powerful electric field. The field strips electrons from air molecules, turning the molecules into positively charged particles called ions. Those ions flow toward negatively charged parts of the plane, colliding with ordinary air molecules and transferring energy to them. That produces a wind that provides thrust for the plane, said Steven Barrett, who designed the prototype.

The team not only showed that it was possible for ion-driven craft to fly but also – due to the relative lack of drag created by the electrodes – predicted that efficiency would increase in lockstep with speed, potentially opening the way for bigger, faster planes in future.

So can people look forward to traveling in planes that are almost silent and emit no air pollution?

"Not anytime soon," says Barrett. It's not clear whether the technology could work at such a large scale, he said in a telephone interview. And even if it can, it would take a few decades to develop such planes, he said.

Before that, the approach might be used in airplane-like drones that perform tasks like environmental monitoring and surveillance, he said. As drones become more common in urban skies, the lack of noise would be an advantage in making them less bothersome to people on the ground, he said.

"I think they're onto something here," said Pat Anderson, a professor of aerospace engineering at the Daytona Beach, Florida, campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He had no role in the research.

He called the results impressive. But the experimental aircraft lacks the range and endurance to serve as a useful drone, and it's not clear whether the technology could be scaled up to fix that or become useful for propelling a passenger plane, he said.

(Top image: U.S. physicists unveiled the world's first solid-state airplane powered in flight by supercharged air molecules on November 21, 2018. /AFP Photo)