Rolls-Royce has announced that it has reached a major milestone in the development of “cleaner sources of aviation fuel, namely hydrogen”. Tests conducted in partnership with low-cost airline EasyJet have shown that the RR Pearl 700 engine, fuelled by 100 per cent hydrogen fuel, was able to deliver the maximum take-off thrust required in service.
The tests reportedly required significant engineering work to adapt to the use of hydrogen and “is another step on the long road to fossil jet fuel phase-out, set for the mid-2030s”. Rolls-Royce proudly states that it considers this result an incredible achievement in “such a short period of time”.
We might have agreed if 35 years ago, on 15 April 1988, the Soviet experimental Tu-155 airliner had not started flight tests. For the first time in world aviation, it was equipped with a hydrogen (and later gas-fuelled) engine, which was developed by the Samara design bureau of N.D. Kuznetsov with the participation of the Tupolev firm and other scientific organisations.
Thanks to the combination of aviation and space technologies, at that time we were ahead of the whole world in this matter for dozens of years. And then, as, for example, with Buran and Yak-141, we announced the world to the whole world and just abandoned everything. They say that the documentation then surfaced at Airbus.
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