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Founded in 2015, LaRochelle France-based Elixir Aircraft has set itself the goal of designing and producing “safer, more economical, more environmentally-friendly, and more versatile aircraft.”
On 19 June 2023, Elixir unveiled its prototype for a low-carbon propulsion aircraft at the Paris Air-Show’s Air Lab. The aircraft, for which no formal appellation has yet been set forth, was developed in collaboration with Air Liquide, Safran, Daher, and Turbotech under France’s Civil Aviation Research Council (CORAC) program.
Undertaken in 2008, the CORAC program aims to accelerate the maturation and market launch of innovative, ecologically-responsible aircraft powered initially by Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) and ultimately by hydrogen (H2).
Elixir claims its prototype single-engine, fixed-wing aircraft, as powered by either SAF or H2, will produce only ten-percent of the CO2 emitted by legacy single-engine airplanes. Elixir further claims its prototype’s endurance will be five-hours-thirty-minutes and three-hours as powered by SAF and H2 respectively.
Elixir Aircraft seeks to decarbonize general aviation while retaining the practical and economic advantages thereof. To the subject of so-called clean energies, Elixir espouses a pragmatic “the future is dictated by what works today” ethos. Ergo the company has predicated its engineering efforts primarily upon SAF and H2 propulsion schemes.
Elixir’s partiality to SAF derives largely of the fact the implementation of such fuels requires the alteration of neither extant aero-engines, pilot training, aircraft maintenance, nor fuel distribution infrastructure.
Currently, Elixir is about the endeavor of integrating Turbotech’s SAF-burning TP90 turbine engine into its newly-unveiled prototype.
Elixir’s management and engineers collectively posit the high operating costs and ostensible technical and human liabilities of legacy general aviation aircraft are attributable primarily to complexity: complexity of design, complexity of manufacture, complexity of operation, and complexity of maintenance. Ergo, Elixir’s design and production ethe favor simplicity.
The carbon-fiber airframes of Elixir aircraft are constructed via the OneShot method—a monobloc technique by which complex elements such as wings, fuselage, and control surfaces are designed and manufactured as single units devoid of complex internal structural assemblies the likes of ribs, stringers, or spars. In addition to doing away with substructures typical of conventional aircraft designs, the OneShot method eliminates orthodox mechanical joinery such as screwing, riveting, and gluing.
In late-2021, for purpose of internalizing all carbon parts production, Elixir Aircraft opened a new production site in France’s Périgny, Charente Maritime region.
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