HERA

HERA aims to identify and trade off the concept of a regional A/C, serving the need for sustainability. The high-level goals are, first, to develop the required A/C-level technologies and, second, to integrate the required enablers to meet the 50% less technology-based Green House Gas (GHG) emissions.

1. Definition of the potential hybrid-electric regional aircraft concept targeting 2035 EIS including key performance, architectures, features at aircraft level and those concerning hybrid-electric propulsion and related or complementary systems enabling such new propulsion and power sources.
2. Feasibility of the real-scale demonstrators -in-flight and on-ground- to be performed after 2025 in Clean Aviation supporting the hybrid-electric validation at high TRL of the widest set of solutions useful to support the next development of an actual regional aircraft.

• HERA will pursue hybrid-electric solutions where amount of hydrogen will depend on many variables not known at this stage: hybridization degree of the selected propulsion configuration as integrated on HERA regional, (i.e. thermal versus electrical share), share of electrical power taken by fuel cells versus batteries, efficiency of aeronautical designed fuel cells, resulting in weight and volume changes affecting payload. Whichever final HERA solution will be, HERA will seek a 15% reduction target for the fraction of on board energy by hydrogen source against the same energy fraction available from fossil fuel in a 2020 state-of-the-art comparable aircraft.
• HERA will also consider new digitalisation and industrialisation approaches suitable to the regional case (from linked projects in Clean Aviation or beyond) able to reduce cost, time to market and complexity of proposed aircraft regional solutions.
• HERA will additionally provide several assessments from HERA qualified partners point of view, needs and perspectives on complementary aspects relevant and strongly influencing HERA regional aircraft.