Project Newborn Team Targets Hydrogen Flights in 2028

Europe’s Project Newborn hydrogen propulsion initiative is on track to reach its final stage in 2026, the consortium’s leader Honeywell confirmed last week, indicating that the aerospace-specific powertrain it is developing is expect to be in final assembly by the end of the year. However, ahead of an anticipated first flight on a demonstrator aircraft in 2028, the partners remain uncertain about future public investment from the European Union Clean Aviation initiative.

Newborn started in 2023, backed by the Clean Aviation agency and tasked with the goal of developing a megawatt-class propulsion system initially applicable to EASA’s Part CS-23 type certification. These regulations cover aircraft with a maximum of 19 passengers.

Overall, 13 partners are collaborating on the project, with Honeywell responsible for the air supply system, thermal management and systems integration. Testing is currently underway at three European locations and is set to ramp up in the coming months as subsystems are combined, resulting in hardware that has reached technology readiness level (TRL) 4.

During a media briefing at Honeywell’s facility at Brno in the Czech Republic, Ondrej Kotaba, the group’s fellow and technical lead for Project Newborn explained that components termed as “critical” have been “fully performance tested and are currently undergoing environmental and robustness testing.”

Entire subsystems have also been manufactured and tested, a process he described as being “very successful, fully matching the predictions from the design phase.” These include ongoing air supply subsystem testing in a vacuum chamber, alongside upcoming propulsion system analysis to be conducted at the UK’s University of Nottingham around the end of 2025. Next year, a fourth test site in Munich will also oversee the testing of cryogenic tanks and hydrogen supply equipment.

With thermal management subsystems currently 90% validated, Honeywell reported that the entire fuel cell power system will be assembled before the end of the year and ground-run in 2026, ahead of an anticipated first flight in 2028. Although Kotaba declined to specify the  aircraft type intended for this mission, he confirmed that the final integrated system test is set to take place at Pipistrel’s at Gorizia in Italy. The Textron subsidiary produces the Velis Electro electric light aircraft, and has been an active participant in several green propulsion initiatives.

Newborn’s megawatt-class system is aiming for a power output of 300 kilowatt per stack, something which, according to Kotaba, “nobody in the world has.” A combined trio of stacks is set to provide a 700- to 750-kilowatt usable airborne power output.

“We are quite certain that 720 kilowatt is something we’ll be able to achieve at altitude,” Kotaba added. Honeywell is targeting a flight altitude of 25,000 feet with a durability of 20,000 flight hours per stack.

“To our knowledge, [other companies’ flying demonstrators or hydrogen fuel cell systems] are not developed to be commercializable in practice, especially in terms of efficiency at altitude and environmental conditions… so we are designing the system from scratch to support all of these,” Kotaba commented. That said, he conceded that the Newborn hardware is not yet a commercial product itself.

Although the demonstration aircraft will utilize two systems of three stacks each (connected in parallel), commercial applications will combine series and parallel systems in line with quadruple-redundancy regulation. Honeywell is also looking to augment the efficiency of the thermal management system through adoption of an alternative coolant to traditional ethylene glycol water.

Future Funding in Question

To date, Clean Aviation has provided Project Newborn partners with funding worth €44.8 million ($52.61 million). However, with flight testing outside the scope of the project, partners are waiting to hear wither additional funding will be allocated. This follows a Clean Aviation third call for proposals, released in September, with the Joint Undertaking’s Scientific Advisory Board reviewing the future work.

Up until a fortnight ago, Kotoba confirmed that Honeywell was having conversations, “every day” with representative groups. However, with Clean Aviation now focused on supporting larger regional aircraft produced under CS-25 rules, Newborn’s eligibility for public funding is uncertain.

“Our opinion is that [this technology] will not get to EASA CS-25 unless it’s proven in the CS-23 world,” suggested Kotaba. Accordingly, the Newborn team is looking to have the preliminary means of compliance for CS-23 certification agreed with the regulator by the end of this year.

In 2026, this will be extended to a preliminary CS-25 framework, in line with the Newborn project’s aims. Although this will “not be a fully developed special condition, it will be a draft of that that will then need to be harmonised with other industry players,” Kotaba added.

Honeywell believes that starting with a comparatively smaller CS-23 platform is crucial to informing upcoming CS-25 hydrogen legislation, since the latter requires more qualification work as “reliability numbers for fuel cell stacks don’t exist in relevant conditions.” Although, the U.S-based company has also extrapolated some data from automotive industry and this isn’t fully representative of an aerospace use case.

Kotaba cautioned that “there are a lot of [technological] areas where primarily research is lacking,” including materials compatibility to long-term low-concentration hydrogen exposure. While a smaller aircraft may use composites, hydrogen’s interaction with the traditional construction methods of larger legacy aircraft requires further analysis. In his view, a greater push for standardisation among developers would also help clarify regulatory uncertainty.