French company Beyond Aero has released an updated design for the zero-emissions jet it's aiming to put into service by 2030, claiming it'll be considerably cheaper to run than conventional jets, while cutting cabin noise by half.
Yes, it's a render – and yes, new and innovative aircraft companies haven't exactly been thin on the ground over the last few years, so a degree of skepticism is warranted.
But Beyond Aero has a 70-strong team, operating mainly out of Toulouse, with some US$44 million of capital on board and letters of intent for 108 sales totalling $914 million in the books. It's a Y Combinator graduate as of 2022, and a member of the World Economic Forum's First Movers Coalition, for what those are worth. This isn't a backyard organization.
So what's the plan here? Effectively, Beyond has designed a new 10-seat business jet airframe around a battery-free hydrogen-electric propulsion system. It's calling it the BYA-1.
Hydrogen carries vastly more energy per weight than today's lithium battery options – but it's not great as a direct retrofit to existing aircraft designs, primarily because it's a relatively low-density gas, even when compressed to 700 atmospheres, so it tends to take up a lot of space that could otherwise be used for passengers or cargo.
Hence why blended-wing airliner designs like this beauty from JetZero are popping up again; clean hydrogen flight encourages new aircraft designs with extra internal space for those chunky hydrogen tanks.
In Beyond Aero's case, this jet will run six hydrogen cylinders - four along the sides of a fattened-out fuselage, and two more held out at the wingtips. These will feed six 400-kW (536-hp) fuel cells, which will convert the hydrogen into electricity and water vapor, and the electricity will run electric jet turbines. Peak power will be 2.4 MW (3,217 hp) when all six are going flat-chat.
A full 250-kg (551-lb) load of hydrogen, claims the company, would take six passengers about 921 miles (1,482 km) plus a healthy reserve, at a cruise speed around 357 mph (575 km/h) and an altitude of 26,000 ft. Slow your cruise speed down to 276 mph (444 km/h), and your pre-reserve range could extend a further 50% to 1,381 miles (2,223 km).
The BYA-1 jet itself cuts a striking figure; it could've ended up looking awkward, but the elevated T-tail, twin electric jets and wingtip-mounted hydrogen pods do a good job of balancing out what could be viewed as a bit of a muffin-top poking out at the sides of the fuselage.
It's a fair step forward from the company's original concept, originally shown in August 2023:
Those two electric ducted fans, says Beyond, run 90% fewer parts, and stay at much lower temperatures than conventional Jet-A burners. These facts, combined with a modular and swappable engine unit for ground-based maintenance, should cut operational costs by as much as 55% – and Beyond's projected pricing on Jet-A and green hydrogen should see an immediate 17% saving in fuel costs on top of that once the aircraft launches in 2030.
The electric jets also make less noise – Beyond claims that with acoustic insulation, the cabin should be 15 dB(A) quieter than a conventional jet, and due to the logarithmic weirdness of the decibel scale, that'll represent about a 50% drop in perceived noise levels.
Prototype and flight testing
Beyond has flown a prototype – well, a prototype fuel system, at least. Last year, the company took a G1 Aviation SPYL-XL ultralight 2-seater, and fitted an 85-kW hydrogen-electric system to drive the propeller, scoring France's first manned hydrogen-electric flight in the process:
That's a fair bit less impressive to look at than the concept aircraft, and probably not all that great for branding if Beyond is orienting itself toward the kind of high net worth individuals that tend to buy business jets, but it's a prototype flight and some tangible progress beyond the renders nonetheless!
The company has already filed for Design Organisation Approval with EASA, the European Aviation Safety Authority, and says it's working with regulators to define the special conditions it'll need to satisfy before the BYA-1 gets certified for commercial use.
There's a long road between here and a 2030 launch, and a mountain to climb. Startups are tough. Aviation startups are tougher, and aviation startups making products that require type certification while running next-gen technologies in their powertrains? Those are an order of magnitude tougher again. Every shot's a long shot in this game.
Still, that doesn't mean folk shouldn't try. With cashed-up, kerosene-fueled incumbents like Airbus apparently not taking the clean aviation transition as seriously as they'd like us to believe, perhaps it's up to smaller players like Beyond, ZeroAvia and Universal Hydrogen to prove out the technology the entire industry knows it's going to need, if zero carbon by 2050 is a genuine goal.
Source: Beyond Aero
