alt Hacker NewsThat's a future thought when it comes to electric aircraft - remote/emergency refuelling. I know they have tested lasers, and even sent a megawatt in 30 seconds over a distance of a few miles, though current convention of the laser back into usable power is around 50% efficiency. All gets down to a needed leap in electricity production and wished the World would get together on fusion reactors and knock it out the park over a mad race to be the first and lock down patents.
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2
A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.
Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)
At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.