Hydrogen offers better prospects for civil aviation than batteries do. Airbus did a study[0] that showed it would be possible to power all civil aviation use cases with cryogenic hydrogen. They even showed that in the near term existing aircraft could be modified to run off of hydrogen for short and medium range. Getting longer ranges would require new aircraft though. They also believe that we could see short range and medium range hydrogen powered aircraft introduced as early as 2015. Of course it's 2018 and this hasn't happened, possibly due to the cost of producing hydrogen.
[0]http://www.fzt.haw-hamburg.de/pers/Scholz/dglr/hh/text_2004_...