Joby Aviation completes demonstration flight with hydrogen aircraft
The aircraft, which takes off and lands vertically, builds on Joby’s battery-electric air taxi development programme and is the result of a multi-year collaboration between a small team from Joby and H2FLY, Joby’s subsidiary based in Stuttgart, Germany.
“Traveling by air is central to human progress, but we need to find ways to make it cleaner. With our battery-electric air taxi set to fundamentally change the way we move around cities, we’re excited to now be building a technology stack that could redefine regional travel using hydrogen-electric aircraft,” said JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO of Joby, adding: “That world is closer than ever, and the progress we’ve made towards certifying the battery-electric version of our aircraft gives us a great head start as we look ahead to making hydrogen-electric flight a reality.”
This is not H2FLY’s first test flight, as the company completed a successful flight with a manned hydrogen aircraft last summer. Another hydrogen-powered flight was undertaken as early as 2020. This was the first test flight with a VTOL powered by hydrogen, however. After completing the test flight, the hydrogen VTOL even managed to land with 10% of its hydrogen fuel load remaining.
According to Joby Aviation, the aircraft uses the same airframe and overall architecture as Joby’s core, battery-electric aircraft. Instead of the battery-electric drive system, this demonstrator features a liquid hydrogen fuel tank, designed and built by Joby, which stores up to 40 kilograms of liquid hydrogen, alongside a reduced mass of batteries. Hydrogen is fed into a fuel cell system, designed and built by H2FLY.
Joby is not only looking at alternative propulsion types but also at autonomous flight. For this purpose, the company recently acquired Xwing Inc. Xwing has been flying autonomous aircraft since 2020, with 250 fully autonomous flights and more than 500 auto-landings completed to date, using its proprietary ‘Superpilot’ software.
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