£7.3 million! Wow, that'll pay the legal team for 1/2 hour's work defending all the reasons this can't go ahead for all sorts of spurious and specious reasons.
Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off
The UK is stumping up a modest £7.3 million ($9.7 million) to develop the infrastructure needed for electric and hydrogen-powered flight. The Department for Transport (DfT) says the money will be shared among eight projects covering airport charging, hydrogen storage, and flight demonstrations. The funding forms part of a wider …
-
-
-
Wednesday 29th July 2026 07:49 GMT Like a badger
Fundamental problem for battery aviation is that it doesn't scale. For drones, model aircraft, even a demo single seater, it works. But for commercial air transport the energy density of all current battery technologies is over an order of magnitude too low. Not only is the challenge both volumetric and gravimetric energy density, equally important the landing weight of a battery aircraft is the same as the takeoff weight. That would of itself use more energy on a flight than a gas turbine powered aircraft, but also the aircraft would have to be engineered to land at maximum takeoff weight, making the airframe and undercarriage heavier too.
-
-
-
Tuesday 28th July 2026 21:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Take £2.7 million out to keep Jodrell Bank running for another year instead
All of these stupid pissant budgets for innumerable vapourware projects from electric planes to "cutting-edge" drones are a complete waste of cash. They serve one purpose - to give whichever twat currently occupying No. 10 a soundbite that appears as if real progress is being made.
-
Wednesday 29th July 2026 00:17 GMT cyberdemon
Hydrogen Aircraft
I have a perfectly serviceable dirigible to sell you
- Generalfeldmarshall Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg
Jokes aside, Hydrogen is ridiculously hard to store, it leaks out of -everything-. It seeps through stainless steel and gradually makes the metal brittle over time as it does so. Liquid Hydrogen in cryogenic dewar tanks would be impractical on an aircraft for numerous fairly obvious reasons e.g. since it needs to be kept at around 20K and isn't significantly denser than its compressed gas form - so storage would be compressed gas at 13 Bar, where as mentioned it will leak through tank walls, valves and fittings to create an explosive atmosphere in any air-filled voids. So either those voids need filling (adding weight, complicating maintenance), or you need special (heavy, costly) tanks, valves and pipework..
Inevitably it would be paired with electric fuel cell propulsion rather than gas turbines, for investor Wow factor (and the genuine benefits of thrust vectoring afforded by electric propulsion, and er, ease of integrating alternative power sources for when the Hydrogen system fails), but all this adds even more weight, cost and complexity that would make it doubly impractical and uncompetitive with both hydrocarbon-burning jet aircraft and battery-powered short-haul electric aircraft
Hydrogen powered cars, aircraft, and the "Hydrogen economy" have failed repeatedly, because it's just a bugger of a molecule to store
-
Wednesday 29th July 2026 09:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hydrogen? Again?
I'd put my bet on e-fuels personally for the next two decades but this could be sensible if they're thinking super long term and targeting the research in the right places.
I don't believe upgrading airports to store and handle hydrogen is remotely sensible. The size of this investment tells me that the government doesn't really believe in it either, but needs to be seen to do something here.
I am super skeptical about hydrogen anything. So far, everything seems to be a way to extract money from governments with a promise of a super-clean fuel that means we don't need to change much, but it never works out. There are no hydrogen cars to speak of, hydrogen buses are going away. So, I don't believe hydrogen use as a storage medium will ever be practical given the handling difficulties of such a tiny molecule.
However I do think that a hydrogen carrier liquid being processed on-board to obtain hydrogen on demand could work, and in that case we will need direct hydrogen-powered aircraft, so this research could be timely. It's probably most efficient to go hydrogen->electricity->propulsion rather than burn it. Electric-powered aircraft are the same regardless of if the batteries are direct-electric or liquid->processing->electric, so research into efficient electric propulsion for aircraft is also good.
I'm not sure we need any government intervention for e-fuel, except perhaps to start thinking about how we can incentivise scale-up through tax breaks. The whole world is working pretty hard on doing something economically sensible to continue using our existing engine technologies, but fundamentally you need to not only produce the fuel, but also supply the energy to be stored in the e-fuel, so it's about 20x more energy-intensive than extracting and processing oil. Extracted oil already contains solar energy stored millions of years ago.
This energy requirement means that if it does ever replace oil-derived fuels, production is probably going to be concentrated in areas with unlimited solar or wind power potential. The gulf states could win again since they have the solar insolation and the flat land, plus the existing infrastructure for transporting huge volumes of liquid fuels, but there are other places which would have the energy density to compete if they can invest enough, early enough. Not the UK, but Australia could be a world energy power.
-
Wednesday 29th July 2026 13:18 GMT Like a badger
Re: Hydrogen? Again?
Policy makers are in love with hydrogen fuelled anything, because they've been told that burning hydrogen produces only water. Even if we had a source of green hydrogen, then as you and others have said, it makes no sense as a fuel, but it could be easily converted to methane or more complex hydrocarbons by mixing in a bit of process-waste carbon, or even atmosphere-recovered carbon. A previous employer experimented around this to see what worked and might scale. There's certainly no point in trying to reinvent the gas turbine to run directly on hydrogen, but synthetic jet fuel from green hydrogen would be easy enough - sadly there isn't anywhere near enough green hydrogen now or any decade soon.
Electric propulsion for aircraft might work for a drone-style air taxi, but beyond that it's a non-starter for the next few decades because it would require new wings, airframes, propulsion, and it would need electrical energy storage and charging technology that doesn't yet exist and may not ever exist. Take a 737 - to cover a reasonable range of short haul destination it needs about 8 tonnes of jet fuel, producing around 280,000 MJ, say 78 MWh. Even at very advanced battery energy densities (that may not be suitable for aviation duty), that's around 300 tonnes. Given that a 737 has an empty weight in the 40-50 tonne range, it may be obvious that batteries aren't going to be a major part of air transport in my lifetime.
-
-
