I suspect the medium term solution would be to make some, either from other hydrocarbons or plant cellulose, or even by the US Navy seawater CO2 to liquid fuel process.
Only if you value overseas travel... It currently takes ~16 hours to fly from SF to Singapore depending on weather. Any longer, and you're going to see a lot of that travel disappear.
It takes that long because it's more efficient to do it in a single flight. Taking off and landing are a massive waste of time and fuel. If we only had short range planes people would change their destinations in some cases or they'd plan layovers as part of the trip. I don't think you'd see that many people just stop travelling abroad.
[1] https://tripsintohistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Clip...
the efficiency gain by not taking off and landing is eaten away by the efficiency loss of having to carry so much fuel (which also comes at the expense of useful load..)
What happens if the KC-135 misses the rendezvous? What if the charging port fails to work for some reason? What about the carbon footprint of these airborne generators?
Plus, now you have the weight of the capacitors to carry around all the time, further reducing the effective payload.
The same thing that happens today with combustion aircraft: the crew makes an emergency landing if they can, or bails out and waits for a Seahawk to pick them up.
This actually happens with fuel-driven aircraft regularly today.
Actually significantly worse than that. A plane gets lighter the longer it flies, especially at takeoff when everything is at max thrust. A battery becomes more and more dead weight the longer you fly.
Fire up google earth and start drawing 500 mile radius circles around metro areas.
Right now, we have relatively large, relatively fast, jet planes. Do we need that size and that speed to be commercially viable? Could we also run a larger fleet of smaller, more automated planes or helicopters? If there was no kerosene left by tomorrow morning, would there really be no alternative?