COSTA MESA, Calif. – It’s just after 10 on a Thursday morning and Chip Yates – whose energy is exceeded only by his imagination – is on his fourth errand of the day. He’s in a small fabrication shop in a nondescript industrial park, with a few minutes to kill.

He examines some steel and aluminum tubing being fitted to the front of a somewhat worn composite airplane that looks like it’s going backward. They will be the prototype for a "refueling" probe for his most imaginative project to date.

Yates is a pilot. He got his license a year ago. Despite his inexperience, he has a dream. A crazy, outlandish, almost insane dream. He wants to repeat Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic – in an electric airplane.

Lindbergh was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic when he made the flight in 1927. Electric aviation is in its infancy, and its longest flight thus far is less than 1,000 miles. Yates plans to fly 3,500 miles, and do so at least as fast as Lindbergh did.

He is quite serious about this. And as crazy as it sounds, his efforts have caught the attention of the Navy.

Yates poses for a portrait on one of his electric motorcycles. DENNIS PROVOST/WIRED

Yates says "maybe 20 percent of my motivation” for the idea, which came to him during a vacation on Catalina Island, stemmed from his desire to be a pilot. It isn’t fame or fortune as a pioneer that drove him, it was the engineering challenge.

“It wasn't about how I can make money,” he says. “It was about how I can spend money."

When he isn’t pushing the limits of electric vehicles, Yates, 42, is a patent and intellectual property consultant. It pays the bills generated by his abiding passion: inventing stuff. He is perhaps most famous for building an electric motorcycle that beat top-tier race bikes and set a land speed record at 197 mph.

That is nothing compared to the electric airplane project.

To fulfill the ambitious goal, Yates must overcome the great disadvantage of electric drivetrains – their limited range. His solution is to use unmanned aerial vehicles that will provide additional electricity during the flight. That’s another way of saying he will use autonomous battery packs that will meet him in flight, transfer energy to the plane and return safely to an airport.

This is so far beyond anything that’s been accomplished in electric aviation as to sound impossible. Electric aviation has only become something approaching practicality for hobbyists happy to fly slowly and silently within a short radius of home. There are some ideas for extending range, but no one is considering anything approaching what Yates is proposing. His idea makes the Solar Impulse transcontinental flight on solar power seem sensible.

You could argue he’s nuts, but the same was said of the early pioneers of flight, who, through trial and error and sheer force of will flew further and faster than anyone thought safe or sane. And while some are discounting Yates as a crackpot, he has the Pentagon’s attention. Electric aircraft have very little acoustic or thermal signature, making them well-suited to reconnaissance missions. The Navy recently signed a cooperative research agreement allowing Yates to work with the branch's China Lake testing facility in southern California.

Not everyone is convinced that Yates is anything but a hot-rodder in an airplane, and his track record thus far – which includes a dead stick landing six days after getting his pilot’s license – has some calling him reckless.

"He's not typical of the aviation industry," concedes Erik Lindbergh, a pilot who is the legendary aviator’s grandson and a proponent of electric aircraft. "He's young and he's a breath of fresh air in that he's willing to risk it all and do what he sets his mind to."

Such things are far from Yates’ mind as he stands in the fabrication shop.

"I've got 20 minutes to kill," he says, looking at his watch, then at the airplane. “What can I do in 20 minutes?”

This is not a rhetorical question. Yates sets to work with his friend, collaborator and master fabricator Chris Parker on the recharging probe that will, in theory, transfer energy from the flying battery pack to the airplane.

Building an airplane is easy. Building an electric airplane isn’t much harder. Building one that can cross an ocean is difficult. There are two ways to do this. You can, like Solar Impulse, build an absolutely immense airplane, cover it with photovoltaic cells and cruise at a leisurely 30 mph.

Yates, who used to race motorcycles, has no interest in this.

"Flying electrically, really slow, doesn't provide humanity anything," he says.

He isn’t after airliner-like speed. Lindbergh averaged just over 100 mph in Spirit of St. Louis. Yates wants to go at least that fast. If that means inventing some method of aerial recharging, so be it. But without the multi-million dollar budget of a project like Solar Impulse, Yates must get creative. Yates, moving at the speed of a pit-lane mechanic at the Indy 500, grabs a part from the shelf. It’s a hub from a GMC Denali, and it will link the bespoke carbon-fiber propeller to the electric motor at the back of the plane.

"It's $170 at Kragen," he notes.

Using the GMC part is not only cheaper, it’s safer. It’s a proven design and less likely to fail than anything he might come up with.

"That's the key to pushing the limits,” he says. “Don’t push them all by biting off unnecessary technical risk."

It’s this kind of low-budget DIY ingenuity that allows him to do things like build an electric motorcycle capable of almost 200 mph. That bike provided the motor, which Yates says will produce about 258 horsepower.

"We donated it to a museum," he says of the record-setting electric motorcycle. “I don't think they needed a $30,000 motor to sit hidden inside the bike."

Twenty minutes becomes 40 as installing the hub takes longer than anticipated. After quickly washing up, Yates jumps in his car and speeds to his next appointment, multitasking all the way. "I've got to call my patent attorney real quick," he says. Who doesn't?

The shadow of Yates' plane crosses John Wayne Airport during takeoff in Santa Ana, California. DENNIS PROVOST/WIRED

Yates was raised in Pittsburgh and spent his late teens at a military academy in Indiana before finding his way to southern California. He skipped college and went to a police academy, but never became a cop. Instead he landed an engineering apprenticeship. A few years later he was in Hong Kong working for toymaker Lanard, where he invented the "Fliplash" car. It was very successful and earned him a promotion. But Yates wanted to move beyond toys.

He was chasing an MBA at USC – where he invented and patented a high-end corkscrew – when a chance meeting led to a job in Boeing’s licensing and intellectual property group. It allowed him to hone his negotiating skills while learning the ins and outs of the patent world. That provided the experience he needed to become a consultant, an occupation that provides the time, and money, to pursue his passions.

It was after this when Yates was in his late 30s when and decided to go motorcycle racing. Eighteen months later, he was running with the pros in World Superbike.

That didn’t go so well. A crash landed him in the hospital with a broken pelvis and plenty of time to think. So he started thinking of building an electric motorcycle – not one for well-heeled urbanites happy to putter around at 60 mph, but a bike for guys who ride like he does.

"I wanted to build a bike that could do AMA lap times," he says, referring to the American Motorcyclist Association, racing's governing body. "That was the only condition I put out there."

Yates works on the tail end of his electric airplane. DENNIS PROVOST/WIRED

Yates sunk more than $250,000 into the project. The result was an aesthetically challenged but lightning-quick machine capable of beating race-prepped Ducatis and Suzukis. After setting records, including the benchmark for an electric motorcycle at 197 mph, at Bonneville in 2011 and making an amazing run at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, Yates retired the bike.

By the end of the year, he was working on his next idea – flying across the Atlantic. Yates spent the first few months of 2012 working out how to get started. To test the electric drivetrain, he bought a used Long-EZ, an airplane renowned for its ability to fly far and fast with minimal power.

The Long-EZ, a two-seat composite airplane designed by the legendary Burt Rutan, has its main wing in the back, with the engine. A small "canard" wing is up front by the pilot. It's odd, but famous for its efficiency and speed. Yates is using it as a platform on which to work out the details of mid-air recharging and see how far he can push the 440-volt, 80 amp-hour lithium-ion battery that will power his airplane.

He’s still designing the airplane that will cross the Atlantic. It will look a lot like a glider, with a wingspan of about 100 feet. But it will weigh roughly 26,000 pounds – about as much as a mid-size business jet. Batteries will comprise about 80 percent of the mass, providing a range of around 700 miles. By comparison, the Solar Impulse airplane crossing the country right now has a wingspan of 208 feet and weighs 3,500 pounds and a range limited by pilot endurance.

Yates performs the last of his preflight checks before takeoff. DENNIS PROVOST/WIRED

With a lift to drag ratio of 35:1, the airplane will be more like a glider than anything else. His plan is to take off from New York with one of the flying battery packs attached to the airplane. He'll use an electric launch cart to accelerate the massive airplane to take off speed. That first flying battery pack will stay aboard for a bit less than four hours before being jettisoned and landing in Canada.

A second battery pack will meet Yates, and connect via a cord and probe similar to how military planes refuel. The two will fly attached as the main airplane uses the electricity from the battery pack. This method will be repeated with a third battery pack as he flies east. In the middle of the Atlantic where Yates will be furthest from land, he will by flying on internal batteries only. Eventually he will meet a fourth flying battery pack that will be able to land in Ireland, and a fifth battery pack that will take him to Paris.

Yates acquired the Long-EZ early last year. He and his team immediately went to work converting it to electric power. By late spring, they had something capable of flight. Then Yates realized he was missing a key component.

His pilot's license.

Rather than follow the traditional path of hiring an experienced test pilot, Yates figured he’d do it himself. The airplane was a known quantity – the Long-EZ has been around since the late 1970s – the only difference was the fuel. So he spent two months earning his license. He had it less than a week before making his first flight in the electro-EZ at Inyokern airport in southern California's Mojave Desert, on July 6.

Without some risk takers, we just don't make progress that fast.

The next day he set an unofficial speed record for an electric airplane by flying 202 mph, eclipsing the previous benchmark by more than 30 mph. It proved to be a bit more than the system could handle, though, and several cells in the battery pack ruptured. Yates made an emergency landing, barely reaching the runway to make his first dead stick landing.

Many in the aviation community found it all a bit reckless. Maybe he was. But in the early days of flight, advancements often cost aviators their life. Yates acknowledges the risk, but believes he has proceeded as safely as possible.

Tom Peghiny, who designed and built an ultralight airplane in the 1980s and helped shape the light sport aircraft category in the 1990s, has been flying long enough to see many ideas come and go. And today he's working on electric airplane designs himself. He says guys like Yates, with their outlandish ideas and far-fetched dreams, are the ones who push aviation forward. Change comes in great leaps, not small steps, he says.

"Self-funded and acting much like a techno hot-rodder, it’s great that there are still people like willing to go for it like Chip Yates," he says. He doesn’t know Yates personally, but is impressed by his background and his approach.

"With regard to his company’s plan for transoceanic electric flight with unmanned power drones, you have to take him seriously,” Peghiny says.

In the coming months, Yates will begin testing new systems on the airplane, including the mid-air refueling probe and a new battery pack. He's enlisted a renowned test pilot, Dick Rutan (Burt’s brother) who has flown everything from combat jets to the Voyager, the first airplane to fly around the world on a single tank of gas.

Somewhere in his crazy schedule in the coming months, Yates hopes to make another run up Pikes Peak and race a gasoline-powered Long-EZ this fall. And there's that research agreement with the Navy, which has Yates pondering new uses for his electric airplane. But his eyes remain on his primary goal – crossing the Atlantic on battery power alone.

It’s a crazy plan, with uncertain benefits for aviation and more than a few things that can go horribly wrong. Of course, the same was said of the Wright brothers.

And Lucky Lindy, for that matter.

"Without some risk takers, we just don't make progress that fast,” the grandson Erik Lindbergh says. “So I really applaud him for his willingness to risk. On the other hand, I hope he stays alive."

Living the Wired Life is a series of profiles looking at people whose passion for their hobbies borders on obsession.Be sure to read them all.