Last September, a small white aircraft with an unusual design took off from Maribor Airport, in Slovenia.
Last September, a small white aircraft with an unusual design took off from Maribor Airport, in Slovenia. The two pilots were not seated front and center; instead, they steered the plane in a capsule attached far out on the right wing. The plane had some other unusual features. On the far-left wing, another slender capsule contained a tank of so-called cryogenic hydrogen, cooled to minus 253 degrees Celsius, or minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit. A fuel cell inside the plane caused the liquid hydrogen to react with oxygen, producing water and enough electricity to power an electric motor with the propeller attached. The plane flew not with fossil fuel, but with hydrogen.
The “HY4,” as the aircraft is called, circled the southeastern foothills of the Alps for a total of more than three hours that day — a major success, according to Josef Kallo, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Ulm in Germany and CEO of H2Fly, a startup based in Stuttgart. “We have flown with hydrogen many times before, but now we were able to demonstrate all the processes required for a flight of more than 1,000 kilometers,” Kallo says. His goal is to make so-called “green hydrogen,” produced by wind and solar farms, the new standard fuel in aviation. “Hydrogen is the most efficient fuel that can be made using renewable energies,” he says.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
