UK net-zero airline goes bust before take-off
EcoJet Airlines, the Scottish start-up promoted as the world’s first zero-emission regional carrier, has collapsed into voluntary liquidation without ever operating a commercial passenger flight.
Founded in Edinburgh in 2023 by prominent Labour Party donor Dale Vince OBE, who has given more than £5 million to the party, alongside former pilot Brent Smith, EcoJet aimed to retrofit existing aircraft such as Twin Otters and ATR 72s with hydrogen-electric powertrains developed in partnership with ZeroAvia...
The company, described as a start-up with no material assets, has no ongoing operations; shareholders agreed to fund the liquidation to ensure employees received full statutory entitlements.
All planned flights were formally cancelled.
8 comments:
The Company I set up to extract moon beams from cucumbers collapsed in failure too!
Vale Dunce.
Tammly - it should have worked, blame moonbeam deniers.
dearieme - ha ha, I wonder if he'd booked a photo op flight for Ed Miliband.
I bet they were careful to hang onto all the subsidies and startup grants though - which was the entire aim of the exercise of course.
Oops. The business model of pumping in cash and hoping something happens is only really for governments, not private industry
Peter - and I bet you are right.
Bucko - I would be surprised if there wasn't some government "assistance" somewhere. Or maybe they actually thought it would work.
Years ago, the soviets spent a lot of time and money modifying an airliner to run, partially, on Hydrogen. A Tu155. It proved that cryogenic Hydrogen was not the way to go. The fact that it flew successfully ( ie without catastrophic unscheduled disassembly ) was an amazing feat, but very risky.
Tony - thanks, that's interesting I'll look it up. There still seems to be a certain amount of work being done on hydrogen as an aviation fuel but it isn't easy to tell how much of it is hype.
Post a Comment