Picture the future of air travel: you’re on a plane that hums rather than roars, takes off without the faintest whiff of jet fuel, and lands, leaving nothing behind but a trail of water vapour. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Almost too lovely for an industry we more often associate with lost baggage and endless security queues.
But will hydrogen and electric planes really play a leading role in the future of air travel, or are they just another pipe dream set to gather dust alongside the jetpack and the flying car? Here’s what we know so far.
The hydrogen dream
European plane maker Airbus has been the loudest cheerleader for hydrogen flight, unveiling three ZEROe concept planes in 2020 with grand promises of a zero-emission airliner entering service by 2035. As reported by BBC Science Focus at the time, the idea was that the planes would be powered by modified gas-turbine engines that burn liquid hydrogen directly, similar to how a conventional jet burns kerosene. Airbus has since shifted more of its emphasis towards hydrogen fuel cells, which generate electricity rather than burning the gas, as a separate and possibly more promising route to zero-emission flight.
Reality has been less cooperative than the PowerPoint slides suggested. A Financial Times report in 2025 said Airbus had pushed back the initial 2035 target by up to a decade and cut the programme’s budget by a quarter after the fuel cell technology proved slower to mature than hoped. While Airbus itself didn’t confirm those figures, its chief executive, Guillaume Faury, highlighted the challenges of the technology in the FT report: “It’s not enough to have a plane if you have no infrastructure, no hydrogen in the right place, at the right time, at the right quantity and the right price”.
The report also said that the wider aviation industry’s roadmap has slashed hydrogen’s expected contribution to aviation’s 2050 net-zero targets. Figures have fallen from a confident 20 per cent in 2021 to a much more modest 6 per cent. It’s not that hydrogen flight is dying, exactly, but it’s confirmation that there’s still a long way to go before it’s powering your next trans-Atlantic flight.
Smaller players tell a similarly mixed story. UK-US startup ZeroAvia has flown a converted 19-seat Dornier 228 powered by a hydrogen-electric engine (we’ll ignore, for now, that the flight lasted only 10 minutes). More progress followed in March 2026, when the US Federal Aviation Administration published the first-ever certification rules for a hydrogen-electric aircraft engine, clearing a regulatory path for ZeroAvia’s 600-kilowatt powertrain. However, as reported by Runway Girl Network, the company has halved its workforce and pushed its timeline back. ZeroAvia is now said to be seeking certification only for its fuel-cell system in 2027, while the entire ZA600 hydrogen-electric powertrain is not expected to be certified until 2029.
Then there’s Universal Hydrogen, who was once seen as a frontrunner in this field, having flown a converted Dash 8 turboprop multiple times on a fuel-cell-and-motor system before running out of money and shutting down entirely in mid-2024.
Progress in hydrogen flight is underway, but in fits and starts, limited to nine- and 19-seaters, not the A320 you’ll board for your Ibiza stag do. It’s also worth noting that the water-vapour-only propulsion I mentioned comes with an asterisk. Most hydrogen produced today is grey hydrogen, made from natural gas in a process that releases CO2, rather than green hydrogen, which is produced by splitting water using renewable electricity. A hydrogen-powered plane is only as clean as the hydrogen it’s fuelled with.
Meanwhile, on batteries
What about electric planes then? Fully electric planes have their own problems. Batteries are heavy, and jet fuel is astonishingly energy-dense by comparison. Then there’s the range issue (electric cars have slowly seen improvements here). It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the only certified all-electric aircraft is the Pipistrel Velis Electro, a two-seater mostly used to taxi around aerodromes for pilot training rather than to cross oceans.
However, electric-powered engines look promising for short domestic hops. Norway’s airport operator, Avinor, pledged to make all short-haul flights of up to 1.5 hours fully electric by 2040, as reported by the Guardian in 2018, covering every domestic route and hops to nearby Scandinavian capitals. Avinor’s chief executive, Dag Falk-Petersen, said at the time: “We think that all flights lasting up to 1.5 hours can be flown by aircraft that are entirely electric.” Given that flights under 500km make up roughly a quarter of all commercial flights worldwide, electric aircrafts could be a plausible solution for a meaningful slice of routes, but we aren’t there yet.
And it’s not all good news here either. In 2021, Italian manufacturer Tecnam, with Rolls-Royce supplying the electric propulsion and Widerøe lined up as the launch customer, aimed to deliver an all-electric nine-seat commuter aircraft, the P-Volt, by 2026. Tecnam suspended the project in 2023, after a three-year study found the batteries would need replacing after just a few hundred flights — making the economics unworkable, not the technology itself. So there’s still some patience required.
Hybrid designs are quietly filling the gap in the meantime. Swedish company Heart Aerospace flew its full-scale X1 demonstrator — currently the world’s largest all-electric aircraft — for the first time in August 2026. Its planned production model, the 30-seat ES-30, is designed to fly roughly 125 miles on batteries alone or up to 500 miles on a hybrid mix of battery and fuel. Certification was originally pencilled in for 2028, though the company’s website now suggests 2031, further proof that “coming soon” in aviation tends to mean “coming eventually (maybe)”.
Meanwhile, the electric aircraft most likely to get you off the ground first isn’t a passenger jet at all. Joby Aviation flew its electric air taxi in Dubai for the first time in mid-2025 and plans to launch a commercial service there this year, cutting the journey from Dubai’s main airport to Palm Jumeirah to around twelve minutes. Separately, in the US, Joby’s first FAA-conforming aircraft began flight testing in March 2026 at the company’s California facility, a key step towards the type certification it will eventually need to fly passengers commercially there, too. It won’t replace your long-haul flight, but it could be the first fully electric aircraft we board.
A wildcard in the mix
The future of flying isn’t only about swapping the fuel, though. As reported by The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal, Long Beach start-up JetZero is developing the Z4, a windowless “blended-wing-body” aircraft that merges fuselage and wings into one continuous shape rather than the traditional tube-with-two-wings design.
It’s still burning conventional jet fuel, but the shape alone is said to cut fuel use by 30-50 per cent compared with today’s aircraft. JetZero reportedly hopes to have the 250-seat, 5,000-nautical-mile-range Z4 carrying passengers as soon as 2030, backed by a loan of up to $3bn. No hydrogen, no batteries, just smarter aerodynamics. We can get on board (pun entirely intended) with the interior of this plane too, which looks more like business for everyone rather than just the few special ones at the front.
So, is this the future for air travel?
Hopefully yes, but it’s looking very much like hydrogen and electric will happen in instalments, with quite a few hurdles yet to overcome. Short regional hops and small aircrafts could go electric or hydrogen-electric before the end of the 2030s, so your weekend hop to Amsterdam could plausibly be noticeably quieter within a decade.
But the long-haul jet that whisks you to Sydney will remain on kerosene for the foreseeable future, it seems. Batteries are too heavy, range is too low, and hydrogen has its own issues, hydrogen has its own issues, not least that it needs to be produced cleanly too. The next time you’re stuck on a delayed flight, listening to a jet engine’s familiar drone, though, know that somewhere a very quiet, water-dripping alternative is slowly learning to fly.
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