That is out of our scope as a business but it is something we have found we have to address head on with our customers and airport partners. They want to understand the whole logistics and associated safety from green H2 production to aircraft tank. We don't have it all figured out yet but we are working with some great partners on the problem. We have created a Hydrogen Flight Alliance here in Brisbane https://newsroom.bne.com.au/hydrogen-flight-alliance-launche... that includes, BOC (a Linde Company) and H2EC who are tackling the logistics and re-fueling of liquid hydrogen. Note that we are using liquid H2, which is more expensive than gas, but comes with a variety of benefits, one of which is that it is stored at low pressure. We could opt to store it just over ambient pressure but we will most likely go with storing it < 10 bar - much less than the 350 - 900 bar, that gaseous H2 is typically stored at.

Good, infrastructure matters: Birdseye, famous for fish, got freezers into supermarkets; Edison, famous for lights, constructed generators; Tesla (co), famous for cars, constructed charging stations.

Sorry - fixed now. Thanks for pointing that out.

Thanks - will definitely take a look.

They are aiming to be the propulsion system supplier for future aircraft but crucially the are also targeting developing systems for a family of aircraft starting small and are working towards aircraft upwards of 200 seats. Our premise is to not look past 50 seats. If we were to design a 200 seat aircraft its CASM would not be much cheaper than the 50 seat if we aim to do a single aircraft type from the start, then we can aim for much higher volumes than aircraft programs traditionally achieve and ultimately bring our unit costs right down and undercut anyone else working on a family of aircraft.

We were so close to buying an old Nomad for our tech demo! But we thought if we took it to an airshow, it would only get a small sub-set of attendees excited, compared to a Bonanza, which people seem to love. We would really love to do it all in Australia and think Australia is a great place to do the initial development work, flight testing our tech demo and retrofitting the first set of our B1900D-HE product. But we would, reluctantly, agree with you that the SA-1 design, testing and manufacturing would be at best global but most likely heavily centered in the USA. Its our plan to grow the team in the states, starting soon, and slowly shift the center of gravity as the projects move through maturity.

The air needed for the chemical reaction is pretty small, but we will also be drawing in some air for cooling and that will be around the same order of air that is used by a turbine engine. We will not have an APU per se, but we will have a small amount of battery to start the propulsion system and this can provide power to the aircraft systems for some time. We can also start up the fuel cells if need be to supply extra power, without turning the electric motor and propellers.

Thank you so much for these detailed answers! It’s really nice to hear from a professional in the field

The lowest hanging fruit is the current 50-80 seat turboprop market. Next would be the regional jet market and lastly we want to capture a sizeable portion of the single -aisle market. The reason we want to compete with/capture traffic served by 737s and the like is that the market is enormous - we are estimating $1.7T over the next 20 years if we were to replace single-aisle with our 50-seat, SA-1. The reason that we believe we could compete is because we believe that we could bring the CASM of the 50-seater down to be on par with a 737, and combined with the emission reduction we think that this is compelling offer for airlines. Our aim is not to have to compete with 737s at airports that are slot constrained but to make use of the 100s of underutilised airports across America. By bringing down the CASM of a 50 seater, we believe that this would increase the passenger traffic too and from those airport and make the currently thin routes more profitable.

I see, that makes sense. There's plenty of airlines like Ryan Air and Allegient who operate thin routes to secondary airports. A 50 seater seems perfect for operators who specialize in thin routes. How ironic if budget airlines beat traditional airlines in becoming carbon neeutral.

No that wouldn't have been us. Hope the feedback they received was "Australian aerospace company - great idea!" though.

My pleasure! Yeah working with the H3X team has been great. We are going to have them out at the airport before the end of the year, letting them run some tests on our set up. Will be fun.

We are not really targeting the private or business jet market (though if someone wanted one for this purpose we wouldn't turn them away!). There is another impressive YC company that is that you should check out, Beyond Aero https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/26134 We are really targeting a low cost commercial market - moving people and cargo. The smaller size is driven in part by the technology - with 50 seats being a good size to capture a large proportion of flying traffic - and partly that it will be faster and cheaper to certify and get a smaller aircraft into the market.