The General Aviation Manufacturers Association has issued a white paper on creating the investment and regulatory environment to allow all sizes of aviation businesses to get involved in the shift to sustainable aviation.
While the conflict in the Middle East has grabbed attention at the pump, one solution to the geopolitical turmoil surrounding oil lies in mitigating the industry’s reliance upon it. The heavy penetration of electric and hybrid propulsion systems around the halls at Aero 2026 in Friedrichshafen made testament to the widespread energy behind those proposed answers.
But no one gets anywhere fueled by dreams alone. It takes investment. Large industrial giants such as Airbus, Safran, and Daher may have the human resources and funding streams to support the decade-long effort it typically takes to bring a clean-sheet model to market, but even they need coordination and collaboration with the regulatory agencies (EASA and each EU member state’s civil aviation authority) to do so successfully.
The position paper released last week from the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, “Wings of Change: A Strategy for Competitiveness, Innovation, Industry, and Investment in Europe’s Sustainable Aviation Sector,” continued the drumbeat that the greater association and its industry partners have been beating for years: Europe generates the seeds of innovation but falls short in its ability to nurture them to life with investment and reducing barriers to growth. Broadly, the EU is advancing its Clean Industrial Deal, and the aerospace industry must play a larger role in this.
One example lies in the battery supply chain—batteries forming one of the most critical elements of electric propulsion systems. The European Battery Alliance and European Raw Materials Alliance exist, but “there has been little targeted effort to align these supply chains with the specific needs of aviation,” according to the paper. Specifically, batteries for aviation must be lightweight and have greater protection from and resistance to thermal runaway—you can’t just “pull over” in the sky if your battery pack starts to fry itself. Swiss company H55 in its press conference with Bristell at Aero noted they had just finished the testing required to prove their battery packs met the strict requirements of EASA’s latest CS 23 regulations for electric aircraft.
A significant part of the investment required must be harnessed to tackle the bureaucratic hoops currently in place to get from ideation to production. That’s the thrust behind the latest policy initiatives proposed by the paper, according to GAMA’s Vice President for European Affairs Kyle Martin. “Everything funding-wise in Europe is focused on the Part 25 airliner, whether you’re talking about Clean Aviation, which is the big research program for aeronautics, or SESAR for the [air traffic management] side, it’s all focused on the Airbus scale of products,” said Martin in an interview with AvBrief.
That’s why GAMA has proposed a “One Stop Shop” initiative that will assist startups and other smaller businesses with the application for consortium and other funding to propel their innovations into reality. “For those smaller companies, it takes a lot of work—the bureaucracy of it that big, established OEMs can manage,” said Martin. “They have experts: lawyers, consultants, and everything else, to draft submissions and join calls for tender, and take some of the legal liability that comes with it. Also, [large OEMs can] form coalitions across countries through their suppliers, because to be part of these things, you have to be in multiple [EU] member states.
“But all of that is almost inaccessible to a small startup company, like you’ve seen lots of them [at Aero]. For them to get EU funding for research, or for development programs, or anything, it’s just a level of bureaucracy that makes it inaccessible.”
The paper also looks at driving the demand for electric and hybrid aircraft in novel ways, including advanced air mobility VTOLs and the short-range aircraft that make up the initial wave of electric-powered models. “These aircraft will be ideally suited to short-haul routes … that align with the footprint of the continent’s underutilized network of regional aerodromes,” the paper states. These include Scandinavia, with its dispersed population over rugged terrain, Galicia (northwestern Spain), eastern Poland, rural Romania, and southern Calabria and Sicily in Italy.
Wide eyed dreaming. Two things necessary to keep you flying– airspeed and money. Getting major aeronautical industries involved is a guaranteed way to kill what little is left of G.A. If anyone can keep G.A. alive it would be China– cheap labour, a huge population, integrated industries, engineering knowhow and a government focussed on succeeding industries to establish themselves and grow. In the Western world we have priced ourselves out of any competitive advantage considering the cost of anything aeronautical for a whole multitude of reasons that are familiar to everyone. And Electric aircraft just beyond the always receding horizon? Best to invest in “perpetual motion” technology. You’ll probably lose your investment, albeit at a slower pace. It’s not over yet, but that light at the end of the tunnel is rather worrying.
GAMA long ago sold out to the woke left in the Swamp. It is becoming irrelevant as a result. It should be embracing fossil fuels instead, the proven cause of human flourishing since coal was adopted as a major energy source.
Seems to me that the primary obstacles to sustaining GA are: 1) lack of A&Ps, 2) unaffordability of parts for old airplanes, 3) unaffordability of new airplanes, 4) scarcity of insurance, and 5) lack of a replacement for 100LL. But I guess GAMA and I have different definitions of “sustainable.”
Two thing that need to change have been forgoten by GAMA:
Electric and H2 powered aircraft are a figment of some people’s imagination. Neither energy source has the energy density for practical aircraft application. Just two important facts: Until the discovery of “Unobtainium” battery density shall remain 50-60 times less than petroleum. H2 at 309 BTUs a cubic foot compares to petrroleum products which have about 900,000 BTUs in a cubic foot which means gasoline products have 3,000 times more energy density than H2. CH4 or natural gas is about 1,000 times less dense than petroleum products. They (batteries and H2 or CH4 simple don’t work as aviation fuels.