Airbus is one of the two aviation giants today, with over 13,000 Airbus planes currently in service. As an industry leader, Airbus needs to stay ahead of the curve in electric aviation development so that another company doesn’t get ahead of it and dethrone it as one of the major players in commercial air travel.
The company has already started research and built an all-electric plane, the Airbus E-Fan prototype, that crossed the English Channel. However, it canceled its successor project, the E-Fan X, during the pandemic. This wasn’t a signal that Airbus was pulling out of the electric aviation game. Airbus partnered with Daher, the maker of one of the most popular turboprop singles today, and Safran, a huge global aerospace company.
Together, these companies made the EcoPulse, a distributed hybrid-propulsion demonstrator aircraft, which first flew on November 29, 2023. The EcoPulse uses a Daher TBM 900 turboprop as its base but features six additional electric engines (three on each wing) powered through batteries or a 100-kW auxiliary power unit. Although this is just a demonstrator aircraft, Airbus’ success in this project might lay the foundations for a future electric-powered plane in Daher’s TBM range of models.
