ZeroAvia in the Netherlands?
Nearly 700km flight from the Cotswold airport to Lelystad
ZeroAvia’s Dornier DO-228 is at it again, this time flying from their home base in Cotswold Airport to Lelystad in the Netherlands.
Folks on the Internet have pushed back - “this FAA registered DO-228 flying around the UK isn’t necessarily flying on Hydrogen, how do you know this ADSB data is any good?”
SkyZero.io’s data agrees with the other major flight trackers, so I won’t bother with that part - but what about the question of whether or not this aircraft is using a hydrogen power train?
We don’t, necessarily - its an educated guess. However, there are supports for the guess, the most helpful is probably this FlightGlobal article explaining how ZeroAvia is “doubling their UK test fleet” to add another DO-228 to their certification program in UK, and the photo shows the same tail registration that’s flying from Cotswold to La Roche Sur Yon and now Lelystad. Is there other evidence?
Well, yes!
La Roche Sur Yon is part of a region that is pushing hard to make Hydrogen a reality in industry, and is the location for one of the three hydrogen fuelling stations in the region. Google Maps even has photos - so, yes, its reasonable to believe they could have refuelled there. Even reasonable to believe that if they’d needed to land early, that the good folks of La Roche Sur Yon might have been able to send a bowser truck to wherever they were forced to land.
Lelystad Airport, besides being the second busiest airport in the Netherlands, is part of the Flevoland Hydrogen Valley, both geographically and commercially as they are listed as a partner of this effort. It also has a “non-public” H2 fuelling station, as part of the H2 Benelux effort. So again, definitely reasonable to assume that they could have ordered a hydrogen bowser at Lelystad too.