1st hydrogen commercial flight, Widerøe Zero & more (Allplane Newsletter #65)
Yet another edition of the weekly round-up packed with aviation news, particularly in the sustainable flight department!
And let’s start with ZeroAvia, because, what a week!
The hydrogen flight startup held the 2021 edition of its Annual Hydrogen Aviation Summit, which has served also as a platform to make some big announcements:
Alaska Airlines is partnering with ZeroAvia to bring its hydrogen powertrain to 76-seater Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 regional airliners. Quite a step up from the under-19 seat aircraft that was so far the focus of ZeroAvia.
ZeroAvia will also collaborate with Mitsubishi in the regional jet space. Although the MRJ is no longer a thing, MHI RJ Aviation Group (the aviation arm of the Japanese conglomerate) ended up acquiring the CRJ business from Bombardier. Will fuel cell technology revitalize this product line?
You may be able to book your first hydrogen-powered commercial flight as early as 2024! ZeroAvia is working with the Royal Schiphol Group and Rotterdam-The Hague airport (a relatively underused airport that has reinvented itself as a testbed for all sort of innovative aviation projects) to make this a reality. The flights between the Dutch airport and London will be on a 19-seat aircraft powered by electric engines that are fed by a hydrogen fuel cell. Here’s the announcement.
“It is a fact little known to the public that most environmental innovations are tested by business and general aviation before being scaled up for commercial aviation” in this piece Eurocontrol delves into the role executive and general aviation can play in bringing forward some new green technologies.
This is a theme we explored not long ago in this podcast episode with Adam Twidell (PrivateFly) and Kennedy Ricci (4Air)
How do airline flights compare with each other in terms of carbon emissions? Here’s a comparison table of several tools travellers can use to find this info.
MAHEPA, an European consortium researching hybrid-electric flight, has successfully conducted a flight test of an hybrid-electric variant of the Pipistrel Panthera light aircraft.
Skyports has partnered with Irelandia to bring drone deliveries to Colombia. What i found interesting is the Irelandia involvement, this Irish investment firm has been behind the launch and growth of some very prominent low cost airlines, including Ryanair, Tiger Air and the Viva family of lccs in Latin America.
Interesting developments up north:
Norwegian airline Widerøe has launched “Widerøe Zero”, which, in their own words, is a sort of consultancy-cum-incubator to support the roll out of electric flight technologies. Widerøe has been one of the most active airlines in pushing for electric flight (a technology that makes sense for their business model, which is basically short regional flights in green-energy-rich Norway). One to watch, for sure!
And talking about Norway, the Bergen-Stavanger route comes up as a particularly promising one when it comes to rolling out the first electric regional airliners…
Advanced air mobility department
SMG Consulting has released its “Advanced Air Mobility Index”. It is easy to get carried away or simply get lost and confused amidst all the hype and the some 200 different projects running in this space. So this index provides some objective guidelines to assess which ones of these projects are closer to fruition. I’ll post you a link to the report for you to check it out. Small spoiler: Joby leads by quite some margin, with Beta Technologies and Lilium in pursuit…
How much will it cost to fly an “air taxi”? Tom Patterson has looked at the numbers in this piece (that features also Robin Riedel of McKinsey, a recent guest of the podcast)
Lots of activity in the European eVTOL scene this week:
Stuttgart airport is going to be one of the nodes of the regional air mobility network being devised by Lilium. I can’t help but thinking that this corner of southwest Germany makes for quite an ideal testing ground for the regional air mobility concept. Economic activity and population are well distributed across the region, often spaced at distances that are too short to fly conventionally, but far between enough to be slightly inconvenient for frequent commuting by land transportation.
By the way, one of the major aviation-related companies in the catchment area of Stuttgart airport is Recaro Aircraft Seating, a great example of German “Mittelstand” firm conducting global operations out of small-town Germany. Check out the chronicle I wrote for The Points Guy about their recent inauguration of an aircraft seats factory.
Vertical Aerospace has closed a new $205M funding round. The AAM space is hot right now! The British AAM firm is working also with London Heathrow airport to see how its eVTOLs could potentially operate at one of the world’s most congested airspaces.
The connectivity between AAM vehicles and major airports is one of the topics we discussed in this recent podcast with the advanced air mobility experts at Hovecon, Chris Fernando and Basil Yap.
London Heathrow airport is not only a base for Virgin Atlantic, an airline that recently placed an eVTOL order with Vertical Aerospace, it is also partly owned by Spanish firm Ferrovial, which has announced this week it plans to develop some 25 vertiports across the UK.
Are European cities prepared for the advent of advanced air mobility services? This study by Unisphere looks at 10 of them (Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Lisbon, London, Paris, Rome and Madrid), assessing their degree of readiness.
One of these cities, Rome, will see a Volocopter on display (at Fiumicino airport) on 27-20 Oct. a joint showcasing event by the German company and Italian infrastructure operators Atlantia and Aeroporti di Roma.
Fiumicino (FCO) is one of several airports in France and Italy (together with Nice, Bologna and Venice) that have created Urban Blue, a joint venture to develop vertiports and provide services for eVTOLs.
World of SAF
Airbus completed the first flight of an A319neo with an engine running on 100% SAF. This is a test programme that the European manufacturer is conducting jointly with Safran and French aerospace research organization Onera.
Twelve, an American firm that defines itself as a “carbon tranfsormation company” has produced the first batch of synthetic carbon-neutral fuel for the US Air Force. Interestingly, Twelve doesn’t limit itself to making jet fuel (which is produced in partnership with Emerging Fuels Technology) out of carbon, but they also produce other items out of recycled carbon, such as…sunglasses!
What else has happened in aviation?
Breeze Airways, David Neeleman’s latest airline venture, got its first Airbus A220 aircraft delivered.
How to integrate the activities of the growing commercial space sector into the airspace used by other types of air mobility. Another insightful piece by Eurocontrol.
As usual, some more new airlines and airline bankruptcies being added to our respective tracking lists.