Aviation Pulls Back From Innovation
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Welcome to the Check 6 Podcast. I'm Joe Ansommo, Aviation Week's Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine. It sounded too good to be true, and as it turns out, it was. Airbus' ambitious plan to develop a zero-emission, hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft by 2035, funded with gobs of European government money, has been pushed back at least five years, if not ten.

That has raised further doubts about the aviation industry's pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2050. And the cost of doing so just got a lot higher, according to a new estimate by an industry alliance.

So, is Airbus' delay in acknowledgement of the daunting challenge of getting hydrogen reliably and affordably to airports? Or is it, as skeptics contend, another sign of reluctance by Airbus, Boeing, and other manufacturers to invest in development of game-changing technologies? After all, demand for current model aircraft is going just fine.

Joining us to delve into all this are four Aviation Inc. editors who've closely followed Airbus's hydrogen project since it was launched in 2020. Thierry Dubois and Jens Flothau, who are both in Europe, and Guy Norris and Graham Warwick, back here with me in the U.S.,

Terry, I wanted to start with you. You wrote an excellent column in the February 13th edition of Aviation Daily. You write that Airbus's decision to put hydrogen propulsion on the back burner is, quote, one more sign of commercial aviation having a hard time in its quest for technology solutions to decarbonize.

You go on to note that, quote, over the last few months, hopes have also been fading in new engine architectures, hybrid electric systems, and sustainable aviation fuels. We've also reported that Airbus has just shelved City Airbus, an electric eVTOL project. And finally, today you were at ATR and they've delayed the ATR Evo, which was a hybrid electric turboprop. A lot of discouraging news to go all around.

Yes, this is very discouraging. And what we see at Airbus was aviation's last chance to be credible on sustainability and this big wasted opportunity. Of course, I was not an engineer. I'm not Airbus CEO Guillaume Fauré, but yet doing such a decision. So such a, probably they say it's a postponement, but it's probably the end of the program. 10 years before the planned entry into service and two or three years before the plan launch.

That really raises questions. They could have worked more, they could have worked longer, and eventually decided not to launch the program. But why stopping two or three years before the planned launch? That's a really big question mark for me, especially as some players in green hydrogen production are accelerating. So indeed, hydrogen is a huge infrastructure issue, but things are moving.

Jens Foltau, some people say this is just another in a series of ongoing decisions by Airbus to bring the focus back to its core business and viable technologies to support nearer term projects, such as an open rotor. Do you agree with that logic?

No, I don't actually, because you see similar delays in the more near-term projects as well. Just look at the planned new next generation narrowbody that they've been looking at. They have clearly said that that is something for the second half of the next decade. And your earlier plans called for that project to be launched much earlier, much sooner. Actually, two years from now.

We don't hear any of that anymore. There are smaller instances where you can discover the same pattern, like the A220-500, the stretched version of the A220, which would have promised a lot of benefits in terms of environmental performance as well because it's a very efficient aircraft. That has been pushed to the right as well. You see a broad trend, which is, as Thierry says, very, very discouraging, very negative.

You wonder why, I guess we can get into that more broadly later, but I think the current issues, Boeing in crisis, supply chain, production not getting up to where it's supposed to be with all the negative effects on margins, on revenues, and the effects on management being distracted by having to deal with just the ongoing business issues.

But I fully agree with Thierry. It's discouraging. It's disappointing. And there are a lot of open questions. Guy Norris, you actually broke this story for the Aviation Reconintelligence Network last weekend. But let's be honest. None of us really truly believed Airbus would be fielding a hydrogen-powered airplane in 2035. I mean, you didn't believe that, did you?

Well, I think, you know, we all thought it was going to be a stretch to say the least. But we saw that, you know, over the past two years, particularly the ambition really was beginning to focus more on a doable, more doable sort of smaller hundred seat type of vehicle.

program, which kind of was beginning to look as if it was within the realms of possibility, either as a hybrid solution or was something that at least could get the ball rolling for the hydrogen infrastructure. But really, Graham and I had been monitoring it from the US side. We'd been to a lot of conferences where over the past 12 months, we'd begun to pick up definite signs that things were slipping in terms of the schedule. And

And in fact, in January, just at the AIAA conference that we were at, there was the clearest sign then that plans through clean aviation, which as you mentioned, has supported heavily zero E initiative in Europe.

had in fact changed really their program goals to defer or delay the hydrogen-related research into the next call, which would really punt it into 2026, 27. And in that case, to establish a TRL level of four or five, which Ebbas needed to even remotely look at it as a possibility for a new product, that was, again, shunted down the track. So I think, you know, what we're seeing really is

You know, I'm always an optimist of these things, but, you know, I don't see it particularly as a massive U-turn, more as a sort of a rejected takeoff, really. Maybe, you know, reducing it from takeoff power to, oh, stop on the runway, let's think again and taxi to the end. So, you know, I still think things are going, but anyway, that's...

It was a shock to see it suddenly do that. But, you know, I still think there's a runway out there somewhere. So, Thierry, Guy said he was shocked by this decision. You and Jens have been interviewing Airbus's top leaders for several years, and they never really seemed to me to be very enthusiastic about the hydrogen project in the first place.

I did believe, maybe naively, but I did believe in the project, partly because it was the last chance, again, for aviation to be credible. And from what I heard and from what I saw, I really felt a lot of involvement, a lot of commitment to hydrogen, both in terms of funding and in terms of technical resources being put in place.

been put in place, being created at several research and technology centers in Europe. So I'll be honest, I was believing in it. And yes, I saw for a few weeks and months that things were slowing down a bit. But it was aviation's only chance to be fully

carbon-free one day. The big difference between hydrogen and SAF is that hydrogen gives you a 100% reduction in CO2 emissions. So yes, I was surprised and I really believed in it in short.

Graham Warwick, you are our resident technology guru at Aviation Week. You've been covering this industry since 1978. Is this a sign that the industry is in the midst of a dramatic pullback in innovation, or is it just an acknowledgment that maybe it took on too much?

Well, you've got to realize this is what in Europe they call research technology, R&T. They call it something different in the US. But the idea is to take an idea and get it to reality, right? It's not product development. It's getting the technology ready. So when they started this program, and it was before 2020, before that, they looked at all of the options and they decided to go hydrogen.

And I'll say this is the same for batteries. It's exactly the same process that led to the decision to pause City Airbus and to delay ATR hybrid Evo, right? You start with a roadmap and you start with assumptions as to where the technology is going to be by the time you have to certify that airplane. So they were starting sometime before 2020, making projections for technology that would go into service in 2035.

So, you know, what we've seen is across the industry is this settling realism about what is possible. So on the battery side, there were some pretty aggressive projections for where batteries could be. And now we're seeing people saying resetting to what is a more realistic improvement path. It's still an improvement path, but it's not maybe as aggressive as they thought, you know, way back before 2020. Yeah.

So you have that on the battery side. And then Guy and I will both tell you that it was kind of weird to sit in some of these technical conferences and have one presentation talking about how you would get a hydrogen airplane into service, and another presentation where they were doing basic research into the materials that could operate with liquid hydrogen. It was clear to us that hydrogen technology just wasn't ready, right? And so what Airbus was trying to do was accelerate that readiness.

And if you actually look at Airbus's statements, they don't actually say that the technology is not going to be ready. They say the infrastructure is not going to be ready. And you've got to realize that what Airbus was trying to do was develop a full-blown commercial airplane, right? You know, an Airbus, an airplane that would go into the Airbus range, be sold to major airlines in major air transport markets,

They had a high bar to meet for an airplane that could go into service on day one, be able to do a useful job, be reliable, be usable, be able to fly to all places you wanted to fly. So they had a high bar to meet. Now, you then switch over to the startups, the zero RVs on the hydrogen side, the others, you know, many others on the battery side.

And they're starting a different thing. They say, I can go into the Shetland Islands. I can go into North Norway. I can go into New Zealand. And I can re-engine a caravan, or I can re-engine a twin ultra, or I can re-engine a Dash 8 or something like that.

And I can do, I can put hydrogen production, you know, put solar panels into an airport, put a hydrogen electrolysis plant onto the airport and generate enough hydrogen to serve that market. So their goal is to get it started, to just get hydrogen in aviation, let people get experience of it. Paul Aramenka, who founded Universal Hydrogen, one of the first fuel cell airplane producers, who closed their doors because they couldn't get funding, said,

But his goal, stated goal, was to get ahead of Airbus and prepare the way for Airbus because they were going to do this small, you know, start small, grow big. So what Airbus was trying to do and what startups were trying to do was very different.

The fact that Airbus has delayed because the technology or the infrastructure is not ready doesn't mean that the startups can't still get going. They have less ambition in the short term. So I think we will see that happen.

I think it's really important, too, to clarify for our readers that even Airbus was saying that 2035, they weren't going to have a 320-sized airliner. It was going to be a small aircraft. And even by 2050, hydrogen wouldn't be ready to make a big deal.

big dent in emissions by itself. But it had to be an airplane that could sell to a Delta, sell to a Lufthansa, and operate the way those airlines want to operate. That's different to selling to a Loganair or a Vitaro in Norway, who's a small operation. Guy? Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, it's an interesting point. I mean, they say that, you know, a rising tide floats all boats, but, you know, without Airbus...

Is there enough of a tide at all? That's my big worry because obviously these projects, as Graham mentioned, they do have a niche. There will be a niche there and that potentially could be exploited. But is it enough to pivot, which is what the industry needs? And we've already said that Airbus has really put the market saying the blame is more on the infrastructure than the raw technology issue.

which has been promising as Thierry's been covering it from France very closely as have we over here as well in terms of the actual fundamental work. And so I think that the question now is really,

really, you know, is this going to push the entire initiative back, even for the smaller businesses too? And, you know, really delay things a lot more than 10 years, which is what they were saying. And just one last thing, which I wanted to make

point out was it was very unusual for this to leak out via the union the force of ouvrier I'm sorry I'm probably murdering that pronunciation but the French union and with Airbus I mean so we're used to Boeing you know where it's

in the US where things leak out through the unions. But for this to have come out through the unions in France, I think was kind of unusual and maybe really showed that Airbus behind the scenes had been planning this kind of big, dramatic industrial push behind the scenes. And when they told the union that it wasn't going to happen, that has industrial implications, you know. To Graham's point, yes, decisions are made based on the roadmaps that have been maybe

building in a too optimistic way or suppliers don't deliver on their promises. I'm thinking battery technology here. And yes, indeed, about the hydrogen infrastructure, it's very difficult to put in place. My concern is that the decision has been made on technologies that Airbus and aviation doesn't master.

as opposed to aerodynamics, for instance. They rely on suppliers for batteries, for instance. And my concern is that they are going to rely, if they want to follow the planned roadmap to net zero, they're going to rely on an even more external industry, which is SAF, sustainable aviation fuels. Nobody in the aviation industry has said, we are going to produce fuels. And they cannot even agree with food producers

on whether the problem is supply or demand. So I'm very concerned about relying on an external industry. At the same time, I cannot help but think that there must be potential internally for significant improvements in aerodynamics. I mean, the 737 is 60 years old. The 320 is 1980s.

I just cannot believe that we're in 2025 now, that Airbus and Boeing are telling us that the technology for something that's significantly better, that would warrant a new aircraft,

I just cannot believe that. And that combined with obviously with new engines. The truth is there's huge backlogs. There's no commercial incentive or not enough commercial incentive for the industry to move ahead faster, which is a shame, obviously. And the industry is in a relatively complex

comfortable position to put the blame on others. There is no infrastructure for hydrogen, as we just heard. They say there's no SAF, there's no power to liquids, there's no synthetic fuels. We always hear that. But at the same time, my worry is that the industry itself isn't doing enough, even where it could be doing more.

Yeah, so I think one of my issues when Amos first announced this, it was at a point of time where there was a huge amount of interest in hydrogen in Europe. In fact, it was the beginning of the whole green energy push where Europe said, we're going to go to a hydrogen economy. Now,

I wondered at the time, aviation was getting ahead of the energy system, right? It goes again to what Thierry says about being dependent on non-aerospace things. You know, aerospace operates inside of a fossil energy system.

infrastructure that's been developed over hundreds of years, not for aviation, but for just general energy. And aviation plugs into that and uses that. That doesn't exist for hydrogen, but it's being built for hydrogen. So maybe in 10 years time, aviation looks at hydrogen infrastructure generally for power generation, energy storage, whatever, you know, steel making, whatever you talk about it. Aviation can then plug into something rather than trying to create something.

But the other issue, and I mentioned this in the story, Glenn Llewellyn, who is the head of the Zero A program, spoke at the Wings Club in New York. You were there, Joe, and Christine Boynton, our colleague, was the moderator on the panel. And he made two really key points. One is, which one I totally believe in,

is that SAF is a... It's sleight of hand. It's an accounting sleight of hand for carbon. You don't reduce carbon emissions. You account for them differently. You say that they're removed from the atmosphere in some way. We're still polluting, but we're removing it from the atmosphere in some way. He said that...

is not sustainable. At some point or other, that will come back and bite us. And hydrogen's the only way to get out of that. If that becomes a problem, hydrogen's the only way out of that. He made that point. The second point, he said, don't forget China. China is going to hydrogen, and it's going to hydrogen in a big way. And it's going to hydrogen in the Chinese way of doing it, which is

everybody in the government, from the central government to provincial government, all aligned in the same direction. So 10 years from now, the world will be very different when it comes to hydrogen.

What about Boeing too? I mean, I'm just wondering what the reaction is at Boeing at the moment thinking, we told you so. And what about all that money? Are they going to give it back to Europe, to all the European governments for their research funds? It could be a good question.

What this has done is avoid the possibility of a split in the industry, a schism between Europe and the US. We were heading to a world where Europe was going to go hydrogen and the US was just going to say, what's hydrogen? Now we've got 10 years for the world to kind of get more aligned. And I don't know what that world's going to look like, but we've got 10 years, five to 10 years for that sort of schism to be addressed maybe.

Before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask you guys, I had noted in the beginning that there's a new study out that just raised the cost of reaching net zero for European aviation alone by half a trillion dollars. Graham, you wrote about that in the story you filed with these guys for Aviation Week and Space Technology. That's all down to SAF. That's all down to the cost of SAF, basically, or largely down to the cost of SAF.

The price is not coming down because the volumes are not going up. Even when it gets to volume, it's still going to be more expensive. And then when you get to power to liquid, which is where aviation wants to get to, as Yen says, power to liquid, that's the synthetic fuel. That is a genuine, you're really, you are making reductions there. That is horribly expensive.

And it's going to be decades before that becomes affordable. And that's all baked into that estimate of the cost to 2050. And that's just because it's become, we've now, they first, they last did the report in 2023. We've got two or three years of experience with SAF. It is not, price is not coming down. Volumes are not going up at the rate that we want. So they've gone in and they've redone that estimate of what the cost of SAF is going to be. And even then, we're not reducing emissions. We're simply just accounting for them differently. Right.

So if there's no hydrogen, we're going to need SAF more than ever. We're going to need the right SAF. It's got to be eventually powered liquid because that's the only one that gives aviation the right solution. If you have to stay with SAF, powered liquid's the only one that uses hydrogen, that uses renewable energy, but you're not going to get to where you could get with hydrogen. So, Tariq, is it time for aviation to stop talking about going net zero in 2050? Is that a joke now?

My fear for aviation, well, not a fear actually, but I think now the only way for aviation is to accept market-based measures, which the entire industry hates. They may have to accept demand management because technology and stuff will be too slow to have a real impact in the next few years or decade. And there is a sense of urgency in all this.

And I mean, that is in fact happening, right? I mean, demand management is happening. The study that you mentioned, Joe, mentions a 20% in reduction in demand because of the additional cost to air travel that we'll see in the next 25 years. So demand will be lower and

there will be less air travel than would have been without the transition costs. So, well, guys, I'm sitting four miles from the White House and I'm not so sure demand management is going to be that popular in the U.S. at least for the next four years. Great discussion, if not a little depressing. But thank you all for your insights as always. That is a wrap for this edition of Check 6. A special thanks to our podcast editor in London, Guy Fernio.

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