Airbus

2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit

A group of young French aerospace engineers who were part of Airbus’s plans for the E-Fan electric light aircraft are&nbsp;pursuing their dream&nbsp;of bringing an&nbsp;eVTOL to market through a start-up called Ascendance Flight Technologies. Airbus stopped the E-Fan project in April 2017 and the following year Jean-Christophe Lambert, Thibault Baldivia, and Clement Dinel were joined by Benoit Ferran to form the Toulouse-based company, which is working to get the four-passenger, hybrid-electric Atea model into commercial service by 2025.
The fixed-wing design, which features a pair of ducted fans for vertical lift in the inner-wing section and a single three-bladed propeller in the nose, is expected to deliver a range of up to 280 miles and speeds of 124 mph. Lambert, who is CEO, told FutureFlight last month that the team expects to have a full-scale prototype ready to begin test flights in 2023.
Ascendance, which is looking to add to its 10 employees, received a boost in January when it was selected as a partner in the Re.Invent Air Mobility project, which aims&nbsp;to introduce air taxi services to the Paris area, starting with public demonstrations in 2024 when the French capital hosts the Olympic Games. Along with 29 other partners—which include aircraft developers Volocopter, EHang, Vertical Aerospace, and Pipistrel—the company will start development work in June in a test area being established at Pontoise-Cormeilles-en-Vexin Airport. 
Under an agreement signed with airports group ADP in 2019, Ascendance is already working to develop plans for eVTOL operations, dealing with issues such as aircraft noise and ground infrastructure. According to Lambert, the Atea is not only being designed with urban operations in mind, and he sees the aircraft connecting more remote communities with larger cities, and also being used in public-service roles, such as for medical support.
The Ascendance team is close to freezing the design for the Atea and has had discussions with EASA about its plans to seek type certification under the agency’s new Special Conditions-VTOL rules. Lambert said that they have been able to use simulations to assess requirements for key elements of the design, including the critical transition from vertical to horizontal flight, aerodynamics, and flight-control laws.
The Atea will use electrical power for takeoff and landing, with the turbine engine powering the cruise phase of flight when less power is needed. Lambert explained that this approach is mainly motivated by the desire to reduce noise and emissions, adding that the planned propulsion system could be switched to run on sustainable aviation fuel or hydrogen at a later date. The company has not ruled out developing an all-electric version of the aircraft as battery technology improves.
This year, Ascendance will be selecting partners to supply some components and systems, such as avionics. Later, it intends to appoint a sub-contractor for the manufacturing phase of the program.
Unlike several other eVTOL start-ups, Ascendance is not looking to operate the aircraft itself in some sort of on-demand air taxi business model. Instead, it will market the Atea directly to existing aircraft operators, some of which are likely operating helicopters today, offering a service-based business model rather than a straightforward purchase transaction. 
The Atea is named after a god worshipped in the islands of French Polynesia that represents space. Ascendance says that there is potential to develop a family of larger aircraft after the initial model makes it to market.
Lambert told FutureFlight that, initially at least, there is likely only room in the market for five to 10 eVTOL aircraft. “Only the smartest and leanest companies will get to the certification stage,” he predicted.
The company says that it has sufficient early-stage financial support for the current phase of the project. Lambert indicated that it may initiate another funding round at some point in 2022.
In his view, the lessons he and his colleagues learned about the nascent electric aircraft sector with Airbus was a critical foundation for its plans with Ascendance. “We had a great adventure with E-Fan and learned a lot about electric propulsion and batteries,” he reflected. “We saw that it is not just a case of [designing] the electric drives and wiring, and that [instead] the whole aircraft has to be designed around the propulsion [system] and the ground infrastructure to support it.”
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Airbus is working on concepts for possible hydrogen-powered airliners that it says could be ready to enter service by 2035. Announcing plans for what the European airframer said will be the world’s first “zero-emissions” commercial aircraft, Airbus on September 21 unveiled three designs being developed under a project designated ZeroE.
According to chief technology officer Grazia Vittadini, Airbus will make a final decision on the hydrogen technology platform in 2024 and ready a technology demonstrator for a first flight during 2025. Its engineering team expects in 2021 to have a hydrogen ground demonstrator ready to help it to address complex technology risks around the ecosystem for hydrogen power, such as the fuel’s volume and cryogenic (low temperature) characteristics.
However, the company added that electric batteries may still prove sufficient to support its plans for developing much smaller all-electric eVTOL aircraft for urban air mobility and other applications. It said it will complete flight testing of its CityAirbus four-seat technology demonstrator through the end of 2020, before deciding on the next steps in its eVTOL plans.
The most novel of the three designs presented to a media briefing on September 21 is a blended wing airframe that Airbus indicated would be able to carry up to 200 passengers on flights of around 2,300 miles. The exceptionally wide fuselage, in which the wing merges with the main section of the aircraft, would provide space for a cabin as well as for hydrogen storage and distribution. The design builds on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2020-02-11/airbus-unveils-maveric-blended-wing-demonstrator">Maveric</a>&nbsp;model that Airbus has been working on in stealth mode since June 2019.
Airbus also presented a more conventional narrowbody model that would carry between 120 and 200 passengers on sectors of around 2,300 miles. The propulsion system would be based on a pair of modified gas turbine engines powered by liquid hydrogen that would be stored and distributed via tanks located behind the rear pressure bulkhead. The design features swept-back outer wing surfaces.
The third design is a 100-seat twin turboprop. It too would feature modified gas turbines fueled by hydrogen and, said Airbus, would fly to a range of up to around 1,000 nm.
Jean-Brice Dumont, Airbus’s executive vice president for engineering, told a September 21 media briefing that the final configuration of the first hydrogen airliner to enter service is still to be determined. “These are concept aircraft. These are not demonstrators and this is not a program, because we cannot yet say what the market is for these aircraft,” he explained, indicating that Airbus will aim the early development work at aggregating the most suitable aspects of the technologies under evaluation&nbsp;and determining how they meet key parameters, most notably safety.
While hydrogen can deliver the same energy as kerosene, it is around one-third of the weight of fossil fuel. “The catch is that its volume is four times as much as kerosene,” explained Vittadini. “So fuel tank design and integration are fundamentally important, and this could mean longer and wider fuselages that have an impact on aerodynamics.”
Airbus’s announcement confirms that it now views hydrogen propulsion as the key enabler for zero-emission air transport. In late April, the company announced the cancellation of its E-Fan X project with Rolls-Royce to develop a hybrid-electric-powered regional airliner. Just a few months earlier, the partners had said that a technology demonstrator based on an Avro&nbsp;RJ100 aircraft would start test flights during 2021. The program had received £58 million ($75 million) in UK government funding through the Aerospace Technology Institute and Clean Sky 2 organizations.
Over the past two or three years, Airbus has tested a pair of all-electric technology demonstrators for small eVTOL aircraft. In 2019, it completed testing of the single-seat Vahana model, and&nbsp;it is due to finish flight evaluation of a four-seat CityAirbus design by the end of 2020.&nbsp;
Glenn Llewellyn, Airbus’s vice president for zero-emissions aircraft, said that electric batteries do “have a place” for smaller aircraft, such as those intended for short-range mobility in urban areas, but that they cannot support larger commercial aircraft. Dumont mentioned that hydrogen propulsion might actually find its way onto an Airbus helicopter before the larger airliners are ready to enter service.
Vittadini maintained that Airbus will not waste the research and development investment in the trial projects. “All our learnings about electrification will flow seamlessly into any of these new concepts,” she said, adding that Airbus has been examining new ideas such as modified gas turbine architecture, new fuel injection principles, combustion chambers, and embedded electric motors.
Llewellyn said that hydrogen propulsion will deliver significantly more energy per kilogram of weight than electric batteries. “This is what [aviation] needs to meet the Paris Agreement [carbon-reduction] targets, and as the scale [of hydrogen use] is increased the costs will come down,” he stated.
Airbus has already started to work with multiple undisclosed airlines, energy companies, and airports to address the complex infrastructure needs to support hydrogen propulsion for aviation. “The entire ecosystem [for air transport] will have to change,” said Llewellyn.
The ZeroE announcement from Airbus came just four days after rival aerospace group Boeing confirmed that it is closing its Boeing NeXt innovation division just over two years since its launch&nbsp;in July 2018.&nbsp;
Vittadini said that Airbus is willing to invest “billions” in hydrogen technology and that its efforts will lower the entry barriers to using the fuel. Asked by reporters why the company is boosting investments at a time when it is suffering historic reductions in revenues and profitability, she insisted that the effort is imperative to securing the long-term sustainability of the air transport industry.
“Why are we doing this now in a crisis?” she asked rhetorically. “We do not have a choice.”

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Airbus has completed two years of flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-Off, and Landing (ATTOL) project. The work culminated in a fully automatic, vision-based flight of an A350-1000 widebody airliner, achieved through the use of on-board image recognition technology, which the manufacturer described as a world-first in a June 29 press statement.
More than 500 test flights were made as part of the project and around 450 of these were used to gather the raw video data that Airbus engineers needed to support and fine-tune the algorithms for the autonomous technology. There were six test flights to evaluate the autonomous flight capabilities, with each one including five takeoffs and landings in the airliner.
Under the direction of the Airbus UpNext team, ATTOL tapped technical expertise from several Airbus divisions, including Acubed’s Project Wayfinder team which developed the Vahana eVTOL technology demonstrator, as well as Airbus Defence and Space, and Airbus China. French national aerospace laboratory Onera was also involved in the work.
According to Airbus, ATTOL was conceived to explore how autonomous technologies, including the use of machine learning algorithms and automated tools for data labeling, processing, and model generation could help pilots to focus more on strategic decision making and mission management during flights, rather than on aircraft operations. The goal is to boost the operational safety of existing airliners, but also potentially allow for autonomous flights by new generation eVTOL urban air mobility aircraft.
“Many aircraft are already able to land automatically,” explained ATTOL project lead Sebastien Giuliano. “But they’re reliant on external infrastructure like instrument landing systems or GPS signals. ATTOL aims to make this possible solely using on-board technology to maximize efficiency and to reduce infrastructure cost.”
Acubed’s Wayfinder team developed the software that, based on computer vision and machine learning, allows an aircraft to detect its surrounding environment and calculate how best to navigate within it. This is achieved using a combination of sensors, including cameras, radar, laser-based LiDAR, and powerful onboard computers.
“The key challenge for self-piloting capabilities is how the system reacts to unforeseen events,” said Wayfinder project executive Arne Stoschek. “That’s the big jump from automated to autonomous.”

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Airbus says it will continue developing its plans to build eVTOL aircraft for urban air mobility applications, despite the recent cancellation of its joint E-Fan X hybrid-electric aircraft program with Rolls-Royce. Flight testing of the CityAirbus multicopter is set to resume at the Airbus Helicopter facilities at Manching in southern Germany as soon as Covid-19 lockdown restrictions permit, a company spokesman confirmed on May 5.
The two-seat CityAirbus made its first untethered flight in late 2019. Like the earlier single-seat Vahana tiltwing eVTOL, it is intended as a technology demonstrator to provide data that will inform Airbus’s eventual plans to develop a production aircraft.
In late April, Airbus and aircraft engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce announced that they are ending development work on the E-Fan X technology demonstrator, which was based on a BAE 146 regional airliner. The project was launched in 2017 as part of a long-term effort to develop a hybrid electric commercial aircraft, starting with the replacement of one of the 146’s four turbofan engines with a 2MW electric motor.
For the E-Fan X project, Rolls-Royce developed a hybrid-electric power generation system built around one of its AE2100 gas turbines driving a 2.5MW generator and a 3,000V power electronics and electric propulsion unit. According to the UK-based group’s chief technology officer, Paul Stein, this represented the largest-scale hybrid-electric propulsion system yet developed for an aircraft. 
Announcing a 49 percent decline in operating profit and a 15 percent dip in revenues for the first quarter of 2020 on April 29, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury made a point of saying that the decarbonization of aviation remains a key research and development priority for the European group. Meanwhile, Airbus is reducing capital expenditure for this year by around $761 million.
Airbus has previously indicated that flight testing of the CityAirbus would likely be complete by the end of 2020, although this timeline may now have to be pushed back because of delays associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. The company has not published a timeline for developing its first production eVTOL model, but it appears to view this as a longer-term project that may well run through to the second half of the current decade.

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