Without waiting for the zero-emission airliner, the young French company Blue Spirit Aero plans to fly a four-seater hydrogen-powered aircraft in 2024, intended for flight schools.
The ambition of this start-up created in 2020, located between the Paris region and Toulouse, is to obtain certification in 2026 of its Dragonflya device designed to train future pilots. “We are making life easier for ourselves by starting small with an ambitious and realistic project,” says Olivier Savin, its founder. The target market is niche, but with a fleet of aeroclub aircraft at the end of their life and the 600,000 commercial pilots to be trained in the next twenty years worldwide, the commercial opportunities are very real. The Dragonfly has six electric motors on each wing, each powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. This propulsion distributed over twelve motors ensures the robustness of the aircraft, capable of flying with eight of its motors out. And thanks to its energy density, hydrogen allows for a range three times greater than with electric batteries.
