How this founder will bring a hydrogen plane to market – in just six years

In early 2024, Toulouse-based startup Beyond Aero achieved a milestone: France’s first manned hydrogen flight. Flown by pilot Paul Prudent, the 85kW ‘Blériot’ prototype, powered by a hydrogen-electric powertrain, achieved two full flights, reaching 2,300 feet above sea level.

Sitting in Beyond Aero’s Los Angeles office, CEO and co-founder Eloa Guillotin is looking ahead to future test flights. The 28-year old aerospace engineer founded the company in 2020 along with Valentin Chomel and Hugo Tarlé. In September, they hired Luiz Oliveira, a forty-year veteran of aerospace engineering, as its chief engineer. “He's just exceptional,” Guillotin tells Impact Loop. With Oliveira onboard, and with around €42m in funding, the company is working to an ambitious timeline: a fully hydrogen-electric business aircraft, which they're calling One, on the market by 2030.

The need for decarbonising the airline industry is well known at this point. Hydrogen has long been regarded as one of the most promising replacement fuels to cut emissions. For context, according to the International Air Transport Association, aviation produced nearly a billion tonnes of C02 in 2019, around 3% of all emissions.

Particular focus in recent years has been on smaller private planes, which emit far more C02 per passenger than the larger commercial ones. This is the market Beyond Aero are targeting, as operators of smaller planes feel more pressure to switch to greener fuels.

“The need of this market is growing over the coming years,” says Guillotin. “It has been (growing) over the last few years, but it's continuing to grow because of the new generation of jet owners. They are more sensitive to the environment.”

Beyond Aero isn't alone in Europe's race to develop carbon-cutting aircraft. Sweden's Heart Aerospace has been developing a hybrid-electric regional aircraft, while Germany's H2FLY completed a hydrogen-powered test flight in 2023. French startup Blue Spirit Aero is also working on a hydrogen-powered business aircraft called Dragonfly.

Steep climb

Beyond Aero's goal – getting its commercial plane to market six years from now – is a steep climb in an industry that usually measures its product development in terms of decades.

Yet Guillotin is confident in her company’s strategy, which she says breaks down into three pillars:

The first is the specific market they’re targeting, private business aircraft in the six- to eight-seater range. Anything below that is a nice to have but not making much of a dent in emissions, says Guillotin. Within that six to eight range, there is a lot of demand for various business uses and intra-Europe charter flights (so much demand, in fact, that Guillotin regularly receives emails asking when it will be ready). Go above that number of seats and you start to get into a heavier certification regime, which we'll dig into in more detail in a moment.

The second pillar, Guillton explains, is that while Beyond Aero are designing their own plane from scratch, they are using existing technologies to build it, much of it coming off the shelf from suppliers. Working their hydrogen powertrain in with existing sub-systems, Guillotin says, allows them to pursue the range they need – around 800 nautical miles, roughly the distance from Paris to Belgrade. That’s well past what batteries can currently do.

Guillotin regularly receives emails asking when the plane will be ready

Momentum happening

The third pillar is the safety and certification process. The specific CS-23 certification Beyond Aero are pursuing with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is for small aircraft weighing under 8.6 tonnes. Go bigger than that and you’re in CS-25 territory, which is a totally different process, vanishingly unlikely to attain in five years. CS-23, in contrast, is something Guillotin and her team believe is reasonable by 2030.

“It's because we have these three (pillars) that we can do it,” says Guillotin. “I do believe in vision, and we have a vision, but I also believe that a vision without an action plan is a dream."

There are of course still going to be certification issues when bringing a new plane to market, not least one with a hydrogen powertrain. Here, however, Beyond Aero is benefitting from the efforts of larger players. Airbus – the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world – is working to develop its own hydrogen-powered commercial planes at its Toulouse facility.

At the same time, airport operator Groupe ADP is leading a consortium to develop hydrogen infrastructure for the future industry. Guillotin says the groundwork Airbus is doing on certification, as well as the build-up of hydrogen infrastructure, is critical to Beyond Aero’s timeline. Without it, “everything is possible, but it would be way harder. We have this momentum happening.”

I also believe that a vision without an action plan is a dream

Despite her engineering background, Guillotin says a typical day at work is split between meetings with investors and future clients, overseeing the company’s roadmap and budget and making sure the staffing and culture at the company are aligned to its goals. In other words, a lot of meetings, a lot of business lunches and a lot of focussed strategy work.

Asked if she’d rather ditch all that and go back to working on thorny engineering problems all day, Guillotin shakes her head:

“I'm realising my dream, my position right now is what I want to do my whole life."