New Hydrogen Plane is 'World's First'
A company based in Germany claims it has completed the world's first piloted flight of an electric aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen.
The company, called H2FLY, says it has completed four flights using the technology, with one of them lasting more than three hours.
After the flights, which took place in Slovenia, H2FLY called it a "watershed moment in the use of hydrogen to power aircraft."
Hydrogen has long been used to power experimental aircrafts — the Soviet Union built a plane powered by liquid hydrogen in 1988.
In recent years, more and more companies have made hydrogen breakthroughs, but other planes have flown using one engine powered by hydrogen and one by fossil fuels.
That's where H2FLY's aircraft is different. It is powered by a hydrogen-electric fuel cell system using liquid hydrogen stored at very low temperatures.
A fuel cell uses the chemical energy of hydrogen to produce energy.
And of course, the important thing about that energy is that it's cleaner than regular jet fuel, because the only waste produced is water.
The developers think that using liquid hydrogen — rather than the gas — will allow planes like this to fly further, perhaps as far as 1,500 kilometers. Liquid hydrogen can be stored in lighter containers which take up much less space on board.
The company said that the successful flights were an important step toward the "delivery of emissions-free, medium- and long-haul commercial flights."
But Josef Kallo, co-founder of H2FLY, said that the short-term aim is to increase the size of the planes so that they might be able to carry passengers on regional routes.
However, not everyone believes that hydrogen should be the jet — or car — fuel of the future, because it's not quite the super-clean alternative we may think it is.
Some have pointed to the fact that, according to the US Energy Information Administration, "it takes more energy to produce hydrogen … than hydrogen provides when it is converted to useful energy."
