GE Aerospace has pulled off something no one else in aviation has managed yet by keeping a hybrid-electric aircraft flying above 30,000 feet, the same altitude commercial jets fly at.
The company announced the milestone on Monday, July 20, at the Farnborough International Airshow in England, working alongside the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Boeing and BETA Technologies to get it done.
The test plane, a modified Saab 340B, carried GE’s hybrid-electric propulsion system built into one of its engine nacelles. At one point during testing, the aircraft stayed in hybrid-electric mode for more than two hours straight, including a leg of its transatlantic flight over to the airshow.
Getting a plane to run partly on electric power at that altitude has been one of aviation’s harder problems to crack. Regular hybrid or electric cars have been around for years now, but doing the same thing thousands of feet in the air, where the air is thin and the stakes are a lot higher, is a different challenge entirely.
GE’s Chairman and CEO, H. Lawrence Culp Jr., didn’t hold back on how big a deal this is for the company, calling it one for the history books.
The system packed into the aircraft includes GE-built motor generators, power converters, controllers, gearboxes from its Avio Aero unit and propellers from Dowty, on top of a CT7 engine doing the traditional work. BAE Systems supplied the batteries, and the nacelle itself came from Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing subsidiary.
This isn’t GE’s first swing at hybrid-electric flight either. The company has been chipping away at the problem for close to a decade, starting with a basic ground test of an electric motor back in 2016. In 2022, it managed a megawatt-class hybrid-electric test at simulated altitudes up to 45,000 feet. Just this past January, GE ran a ground test of a narrowbody hybrid-electric engine that didn’t even need battery storage to function, a design detail engineers say is critical for making the technology practical on commercial aircraft down the line.
The bigger goal behind all of this is fuel savings. GE is folding what it’s learned from these tests into its CFM International RISE engine program, which the company says is aiming for more than 20% better fuel efficiency compared to today’s engines.
Visitors to the Farnborough airshow this week will actually get to see the technology in person too. GE has scheduled public demonstration flights of the modified aircraft throughout the event, along with a static display for anyone who wants a closer look on the ground.
