Japan to invest $205M in electric aircraft systems

The government of Japan will invest 30.6 billion yen ($205 million) in electric aircraft systems, with research and development to begin in 2024. The move comes amid pressure on operators in the aviation industry and governments around the globe to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will invest $116 million of the funding into the development of hydrogen fuel cell systems for aircraft and $89 million into fuel-saving engine-control technology. The news was first reported by business journal Nikkei Asia. The initiative is part of Japan’s Green Innovation Fund, which is overseen by the ministry’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. The government will begin searching for participants — including aerospace, battery and technology companies — for the project this year, the news outlet reported. Japan’s government did not respond to inquiries from Air Cargo Next about the project. Carbon emissions from aviation account for 2% of global emissions , according to IATA . Major carriers have relied on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to slash emissions, despite its scarce feedstock. Hydrogen has more recently been looked at for its benefits , including availability. But it poses significant challenges for larger aircraft, including freighters, Pat Anderson , professor of aerospace engineering and the director of the Eagle Flight Research Center at Embry ‑ Riddle Aeronautical University , told Air Cargo Next . Development and technology “Any of these electric airplanes, whether it’s hydrogen battery or hybrid, on this scale is going to be a new and novel certification path,” Anderson said. “And what we’ve seen, even in little airplanes, is that if you put new and novel technology on an airplane, it takes substantially longer to certify it.” Not only are certification processes by the FAA and EASA extensive, but the technology needed to transport and store hydrogen is in its infancy, Anderson said. “Hydrogen is very energetic. It’s three times more energetic than regular liquid aviation fuel, so that’s good,” he said. “The bad news is that it’s a gas, and so you either have to store it in gaseous form and incredibly high pressure tanks, which adds a lot of weight, or you have to store it as a cryogenic, which is a liquid that is at very low temperatures, which has all the problems associated with very, very low temperatures.” Despite being “a proponent of electric propulsion,” Anderson said there is no technology today to use hydrogen or battery power for airline-size aircraft. The next two decades will likely see smaller hydrogen-fueled aircraft and larger SAF-fueled aircraft, Anderson said. While its feedstock is low, SAF is created to work with existing infrastructure in larger aircraft, he said. Despite this, aerospace experts are still exploring hydrogen as a solution to aviation’s carbon reduction challenges. Here are some recent developments: Huntington Beach, Calif.-based startup Novadev has designed a freighter intended to be fully functional with hydrogen-fueled turbine engines; European drone developer Dronamics last week signed an agreement with Cranfield Aerospace Solutions f or hydrogen fuel cell propulsion systems to retrofit its Black Swan long-range cargo drone; and Dutch and German aerospace pilots recently flew a ceremonial all-electric flight from Maastricht Aachen Airport (MST) to Aachen Merzbruck Airport (AAH). Still, the industry is decades away from successfully operating a fully electric cargo plane, Anderson said. He added he does not believe the industry has the knowledge yet to develop solely hydrogen or battery power for large-scale aircraft. “We would have to learn more to do that,” he said. “It would be some pretty heavy-duty science to do that. “So again, this is an opinion, but the fact that SAF uses all the same infrastructure and so forth, it seems that scaling that up is a very clear path,” he added. “I can’t tell you the path for [hydrogen], because it requires us inventing stuff that we don’t yet understand.”

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