The first free flight of an eVTOL that will be powered by hydrogen took place in Australia earlier this week. The Vertiia used battery power to do 50 vertical takeoffs and landings at AMSL Aero's Bankstown, New South Wales facility. It had been doing the same thing with a tether since last February. Future flights will use hydrogen and that's key to the marketability of the aircraft as a long-range eVTOL.
Australia is promoting electric/hydrogen for ecological reasons, but it’s use will encourage and support more building and industry and more consumption in remote wilderness areas? Classic.
I don’t mean to be a critic of style, but they might need to do a little aerodynamic cleanup before trying to fly the thing at 200 mph. Right now it looks like it was made from a kid’s erector set. As for the use of hydrogen fuel, Australia has huge reserves of natural gas, so they can produce lots of “gray” hydrogen. But, as with batteries, hydrogen has a big problem with storage for use on an aircraft. One can either use high pressure gas cylinders, or a cryogenic liquid H2 container, both of which are heavy and difficult to mold into the airframe of a flying machine, VTOL or otherwise.
I agree. If the goal is electric power H2/ fuel cell makes more sense than batteries. Longer range, lighter, and quicker refueling. Also the hydrogen can be produced off of fossil fuels so plentiful and inexpensive.
If they can deliver on a reasonable fraction of their claims - speeds of 200 mph or knots or furlongs per second or whatever, operating costs of 70 to 170 percent lower, 10 second or minute or so refueling time, etc., then the existance of helicopters becomes becomes moot.
From Flight Global: Developing novel propulsion technologies has proven more challenging than expected, leaving Embraer’s chief engineer now predicting his team would need until 2040 to bring a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered aircraft to market.
Hydrogen is a terrible fuel. First off, it takes more energy to produce it than you get back using it. Then there are the energy losses in liquifying it. Then there are the problems of leaks and venting that take another huge slice.
The main thing against hydrogen as a fuel is that we’ve had it for a very long time and the only people that can afford to use it are government agency rocket programs.
Seems like it would be best to turn the hydrogen in to a liquid fuel, maybe with the same density and energy content as….wait for it……avags.
Seriously, seems like a lot of folks have a solution in search of a problem.
I would really like to see the marketing presentations that were so great that they convinced somebody to drop a large fortune on these development projects.
