Complexities of the Simplest Element

ZeroAvia, the British/American hydrogen/electric aircraft developer and Otto Aviation, the aerospace company founded by Los Alamos engineer Bill Otto, have entered into an agreement by which the former will integrate its ZA600 zero-emission engines into the latter’s unconventional Celera aircraft.

The Celera is a prototype aircraft that seeks to improve the efficiency of flight, thereby reducing the operational costs of both commercial and general aviation. The design of the Celera’s fuselage, empennage, and wings takes advantage of laminar flow, a black-magic deriving of Bernoullian and Coandaian principals which state a fluid stream follows the contours of an adjacent surface. Coupled with ZeroAvia’s hydrogen/electric powertrain, the Celera stands to exceed the range, efficiency, and environmental friendliness of conventional aircraft.  

The Celera is a mid-wing monoplane with a single, five-blade propeller in a pusher configuration. The airplane’s designers assert its low-drag, 35-foot (11 m) long fuselage and 55-foot (17 m), high-aspect-ratio wingspan make for a 22:1 glide ratio. The design, which is scalable to 19 passengers and evocative of a stretched, albino Glamorous Glennis, raises the specter of what might have been had Burt Rutan worked for the Luftwaffe.

The Celera’s ambitious range goals derive of its fuselage design being highly conducive to accommodating large volumes of hydrogen.

The evolution of ZeroAvia‘s ZA-600, a hydrogen/electric aircraft engine began in 2019, when the company undertook flight-testing of the electrical aspects of an initial powertrain design utilizing a Piper Matrix fitted with an external hydrogen tank. Subsequent development yielded the ZA250 hydrogen/electric powertrain, which was flight-tested in a Piper Malibu.

In December 2020, the UK Government's ATI Programme awarded ZeroAvia £12.3-million to develop a 19-seat, hydrogen-powered aircraft with a 350-mile (560 km) flight to be completed by 2023. In August 2021, ZeroAvia completed the first high-power run of its ZA-600 hydrogen/electric engine in furtherance of the company’s HyFlyer II program—a project that aims to decarbonize small, medium-range, passenger aircraft by replacing conventional piston engines with electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells.

FMI: https://www.zeroavia.com/about-us, https://ottoaviation.com