French aerospace entrepreneur David Gazellot is paying homage to one of the pioneers of French aviation with its new green aviation project: Avions Mauboussin.

David joins us on the podcast to explain this fascinating project to create a family of brand new hybrid STOL aircraft for regional air travel. And we also review, of course, the story of the historical Mauboussin, its time and its acomplishments.

Jason Chua is the COO of Universal Hydrogen. A veteran of Google, Airbus and United Technologies Jason has come on the podcast to explain Universal Hydrogen’s audacious plan to facilitate the adoption of hydrogen thanks to a truly innovative approach.

Universal Hydrogen’s founders have taken their inspiration from the consumables business model - which has proven to be a big success for firms such as HP and Nestlé’s Nespresso - to come up with a system for airlines convert their aircraft to hydrogen propulsion while securing long term contracts to supply hydrogen capsules to power them.

Things we talk about in this episode:

André Borschberg’s career as an aviation pioneer and entrepreneur

The Solar Impulse Project

What is H55 and what is it trying to do?

How does learning to fly on an electric plane differs from doing so on a conventional one

The future of electric aviation

What is the story of hydrogen flight startup ZeroAvia? How is it funded? How does its technology work?

And what are the next milestones for ZeroAvia after testing its first hybrid-electric demonstrator last summer?

Katya Akulinicheva, ZeroAvia’s CFO, answers all these questions and talks about how ZeroAvia aims to disrupt the aviation industry for better with its hydrogen powertrain.

Things we talk about in this episode:

General overview of the Russian aviation sector: size of the market and trends

How the Covid crisis has affected Russian air traffic

How Russian commercial aviation has been totally transformed since the messy transition of the post-Soviet years

Review of major airlines in Russia, who are the movers and shakers?

Low cost airlines in Russia, a story of growth

Regional airlines in Russia: the next big thing?

Investment in Russian airports

Development of regional airline networks in Russia

Prospects for air traffic development in Russia

Prospects for Russian-made airliners

An old industry joke says that an aircraft is “a set of parts flying in formation”.

Parts and spares are, indeed, essential for any complex machine to work properly and this is precisely the area of expertise of this episode’s guest.

Alex Duran is the co-founder, together with Jasin Colar, of Nexspares, a consultancy firm based in Zürich, Switzerland, that helps airlines the world over source their parts and spares in the most efficient way possible.

We had a chance to talk about this area of the commercial aviation business, how airlines source parts when they need them, what sort of procedures are there in place to guarantee safety and prevent counterfeiting and, more generally, how aircraft parts and spares are traded in the global market.

Things we talk about in this episode:

How this record-breaking flight was planned

The practicalities and challenges of flying across Europe in an electric aircraft

How green mobility enthusiasts from across Germany rallied behind he project

The future of green flying and prospects for electric aircraft development

Things we talk about in this episode

How does the aviation fuel market work

Why arranging aircraft re-fuelling can be a messy business

What does the IATA Fuel Data Standards Group (FDSG) do?

What are IATA’s XML fuel standards and why they matter

What is Gazpromneft-aero and why it is an early adopter of IATA’s XML fuel standards?

Has Covid-19 accelerated the adoption of digital standards in the aviation fuel world?

Back in 2009 Maria came across a former Aeroflot Tu-104 that had been left on the ground at a local airfield in Siberia since the late 1970s. This sight inspired her to find out more about that aircraft and was the start of a journey to which she has devoted plenty of time and efforts since.

Together with a group of volunteers, Maria has been painstakingly researching and restoring this aircraft, taking care of sourcing original parts and components wherever she could find them on the internet and bringing the cabin back to its original state.

As the aircraft is nearing completion, she joins us today on the podcast to tell us her story and that of this very inspiring passion project!

Jordi Candela is the director of Airports of Catalonia, a government-owned company that manages two regional airports near Barcelona. What makes this small airport operator interesting for the rest of the industry? Passenger volumes at both these airports are admittedly low, yet, each of them presents an interesting cases of specialization in a very particular niche…