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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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There's a lot of activity on the hydrogen-fueled aviation front.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/hydrogen-fuel-cell-aircraft-explained/
The infrastructure issues for planes are way less. You need fuel available at airports, which significantly fewer and farther between than consumers require for cars. Planes (and least of the jet variety) already use specialized fuel they keep available at airports. The phase-in is a lot easier too, since most running planes only travel between a few airports in their route — so you'd only need the hydrogen fuel available at the airports hydrogen planes are using to start.
There's certainly a lot of challenges to solve there too, but hydrogen remains the most promising solution for decarbonizing air travel.
Yep I saw that story as well but it kind of makes my point: the first flight took until 2023 to happen. Thats not what I call “a lot” of activity.
You’re succeeding at favorably comparing the infrastructure challenges of hydrogen aviation to the infrastructure challenges of hydrogen for private cars, but that’s not really the bar to meet. All air infra is more consolidated than that of ground transport. The argument works for batteries just as easily.
Batteries (currently) are way too heavy for commercial planes. They can be used for the smaller propeller planes, but not for jets.
I don't know what you were expecting to see to indicate activity. Flight tests are a pretty far along milestone, given the expense and time it takes to make a test plane. That nothing went wrong on the test flight is even more impressive, given that the engineering of using hydrogen in planes is still ongoing (as the article mentions).