Eventful week for hydrogen-powered flight: ZeroAvia flew its prototype

Last week, was an eventful one for proponents of hydrogen as clean energy source to power aviation.

In addition to Airbus presenting its triad of hydrogen-powered concepts, on September 24th another, smaller but very promising firm, achieved a significant milestone in the quest to make of hydrogen the power source of choice for aviation.

Hydrogen flight startup ZeroAvia completed nothing less than the first hydrogen-electric passenger airplane flight, in cooperation with Cranfield University, one of the hubs of aerospace research and development in Europe, and the HyFlyer research programme, funded by the Her Majesty’s government.

The aircraft in question, a six-seater Piper M-Class, was powered by a hydrogen-powered fuel cell. A small aircraft, indeed, but this actually is the largest hydrogen-powered aircraft to fly and it has room for at least some passengers, which means it could, in theory, operate commercially.

And there’s more to come: as it puts it in its website, ZeroAvia expects “certified 10-20 seat configurations ready to go within three years, and 50-100 seat configurations in flight by the end of the decade. The company projects that aircraft over 200 seats with a range in excess of 3,000 nautical miles is achievable by 2040 without requiring any fundamental scientific breakthroughs”.

The next step is a 250-mile long flight is planned for later this year in the Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland.

Exciting times!

And, by the way, if wondering why hydrogen may be the answer to increasingly insistent calls to decarbonize aviation and what are the pros and cons of hydrogen technology when compared to electric batteries, check out this podcast with aerospace engineer and propulsion expert, Bjorn Fehrm!