HySIITE, short for Hydrogen Steam Injected, Inter Cooled Turbine Engine, emerged from a project that treated hydrogen not just as a drop in replacement for jet fuel, but as a fundamentally different working fluid. The team wanted to reimagine the engine from the ground up around hydrogen's properties, including its high flame speed and temperature. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA E program, they tested the concept on rigs at the RTX Technology Research Center in East Hartford, Connecticut, demonstrating an architecture that could improve performance by about 35 percent while nearly eliminating nitrogen oxide emissions.

The key enabler was the way the engine handles water. When hydrogen burns, it produces water vapor as a natural by product. In the HySIITE concept, the engine captures roughly a gallon of this water every three seconds from the exhaust stream. That recovered water is then used as steam inside the engine to control how the liquid hydrogen burns, helping to manage flame speed and temperature, while also recapturing waste heat and improving overall cycle efficiency.

The project team explored a recuperated engine cycle, an idea studied for decades but rarely practical for large commercial aircraft. Traditionally, recuperation relies on bulky heat exchangers to transfer energy from hot exhaust to the core flow, adding weight and complexity. In this case, engineers instead considered steam injection as a way to recover heat. That shift opened the door to a different architecture, and it was here that DISCOVER proved critical in identifying how to make the cycle viable for commercial scale propulsion.

DISCOVER is an AI powered design space exploration program developed at the RTX Technology Research Center in partnership with Collins Aerospace. Its role is to take lists of components, rules about how they can connect, and performance models, then generate and evaluate vast numbers of system architectures. For the hydrogen engine, Steve Taylor and Joe Turney of the DISCOVER team calculated that the roughly 70 engine components could be arranged in about a quattuorvigintillion different ways, a one followed by 75 zeros. That figure far exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, making any manual or conventional parametric search impossible.

To make the problem tractable, the team encoded engineering rules and constraints into DISCOVER and let the software sift through the design space. From the ocean of possibilities, DISCOVER identified 4,202 architectures that met the feasibility criteria and could plausibly deliver the performance the engineers wanted. Those candidate designs were plotted as a cloud of points, each representing a different engine configuration, and the team could see at a glance which arrangements delivered the best combinations of efficiency, emissions and practicality.

Before DISCOVER, engineers might have been able to study only a handful of architectures in the same amount of time. With the tool, they were able to validate thousands, and just as important, understand why some designs worked better than others. As Larry Zeidner, a technical fellow and leader of the DISCOVER development team, explained, the challenge is not recognising a good design once you see it, but finding it in a vast sea of options. DISCOVER became the mechanism for separating the metaphorical pearls from the surrounding water.

One of the most important insights from this process was the value of shrinking the engine core. DISCOVER's analysis highlighted that a smaller core made it easier to capture and circulate water, and that water, once injected as steam, made it feasible to maintain a compact core while still realizing high efficiency. This created what engineers described as a virtuous cycle: a smaller core simplifies water capture and convection, and that water, in turn, supports the steam injection strategy that enables the smaller core to work so effectively.

The HySIITE team also had to overcome two intertwined challenges inherent in hydrogen combustion. Hydrogen burns extremely hot and very fast, which makes its flame difficult to control and raises the risk of high nitrogen oxide formation. At the same time, the engine needed steam in the combustor to increase efficiency, but too much steam can quench the flame and destabilize combustion. As project lead Neil Terwilliger put it, it can feel like trying to light and sustain a fire while simultaneously spraying it with a hose.

Through testing and analysis, the group discovered that hydrogen's high flame temperature and speed could be turned into an advantage. By carefully tuning the mixture, they were able to inject substantial amounts of steam into the combustor, using it to moderate flame temperature and control flame speed without losing stability. Terwilliger reported that the team observed near elimination of nitrogen oxide production, with no issues of the flame flashing back onto hardware or causing thermal damage. In this case, two apparent problems cancelled one another, creating a narrow but workable operating window.

While commercial hydrogen powered aircraft remain decades away, the HySIITE concept suggests that hydrogen engines could deliver roughly three times the net energy savings compared with synthetic aviation fuels when evaluated on a system basis. The work feeds into ongoing industry wide discussions about future aviation fuels and propulsion architectures, offering a concrete data point on how much better engines can be when designed specifically around hydrogen. For advanced concepts teams at Pratt and Whitney, this helps answer a central question: if hydrogen is available, what is the best use of it in an engine?

Under the hood, DISCOVER operates by combining rule based architecture generation with numerical models that simulate thermodynamics, aerodynamics, cost and reliability. Once the program identifies feasible architectures, it evaluates them against performance and risk metrics, allowing engineers to see not only which design scores highest, but also how sensitive different configurations are to assumptions and uncertainties. The dense cloud of data points reveals which features contribute most to performance and which design choices tend to hold concepts back.

This deeper understanding lets engineering teams prioritize where to invest technology development resources. If certain features consistently appear in the highest performing architectures, they become candidates for additional research and maturation. Conversely, if an otherwise promising architecture underperforms for a clear reason, engineers can search for workarounds or new technologies to remove that limitation. DISCOVER thus becomes part decision support tool, part technology roadmap generator.

RTX is now working on a successor program that will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore even larger design spaces and streamline the way teams visualize and interpret the data. The aim is to make it easier for subject matter experts, who may not be specialists in AI, to interact with and benefit from advanced design tools. Better visualizations can help them understand tradeoffs more intuitively and spot non obvious trends in the cloud of candidate solutions.

Beyond hydrogen engines, teams across RTX are already applying DISCOVER to a variety of aerospace and defense challenges. Collins Aerospace has used the tool to create new layouts for aircraft galleys and to design a power and thermal management system for the U.S. Air Force. Raytheon is employing it to explore novel microelectronics architectures in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, combining unconventional device concepts with new packaging and integration strategies.

Pratt and Whitney and the RTX Technology Research Center have also used DISCOVER in collaborations with universities to examine hybrid electric propulsion concepts. In these studies, the tool helps partition power flows between electrical and mechanical paths and explores where generators, motors, batteries and turbines should be placed to best balance efficiency, weight and reliability. As more teams inside RTX learn to use the software, its impact is expected to grow beyond pure performance optimization.

One emerging focus is manufacturability and life cycle cost. Engineers such as Mike Ikeda in the RTX Chief Technology Office are asking whether design space exploration can be expanded to include metrics such as ease of production, cost, and durability in service. The goal is to give designers earlier access to information about how their choices affect production complexity and long term maintenance, so they can choose architectures that are not only efficient, but also practical to build and sustain.

Ultimately, Zeidner and his colleagues argue that DISCOVER's value lies in helping experts do what they already do, but faster, with more confidence and less risk. By automating the search through billions or trillions of possible architectures and presenting distilled, interpretable results, the software allows human engineers to spend more time on high level judgment and creative problem solving. The HySIITE hydrogen engine concept stands as an example of how combining advanced computational tools with domain expertise can unlock architectures that might otherwise remain hidden in an overwhelming design space.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Singapore (AFP) Feb 2, 2026 - The airline industry's green transition is stalling as high costs and limited output choke the rollout of cleaner jet fuel, the head of the industry's trade association said on Monday.

"Unfortunately, we're not making sufficient progress on sustainable aviation fuel," International Air Transport Association (IATA) director-general Willie Walsh told the Changi Aviation Summit in Singapore.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is billed as a key tool to curb carbon emissions from planes, and took centre stage at the conference ahead of the Singapore Airshow.

"SAF output reached 1.9 million tonnes in 2025, representing just 0.6 percent of total jet fuel consumption, and this is a downward revision from our earlier estimates," Walsh said.

Mandatory rules requiring airlines to include a certain percentage of SAF in their fuel mix "have pushed prices higher" and "discouraged voluntary demand," he added.

European Union rules, for example, require carriers to include two percent of SAF in their fuel mix starting this year, rising to six percent in 2030 and 20 percent in 2035, before soaring to 70 percent from 2050.

Walsh said that SAF prices exceeded fossil-based jet fuel "by a factor of more than two, while the evidence shows that in markets with mandates, that factor can increase to four times".

To bolster take-up, Singapore's civil aviation authority signed an agreement on Monday with nine companies for a "voluntary trial" to buy SAF through a central procurement firm set up by the regulator.

The trial, which includes Google, state investment firm Temasek and Singapore Airlines, will support Singapore's aim to increasingly favour green jet fuel.

From October 1, Singapore will require all flights departing from the city-state to use one percent of the more expensive SAF in their fuel mix, and will collect a levy to finance that, likely raising ticket prices.

Singapore said it will increase the ratio of SAF in the blend to three to five percent by 2030 in line with targets set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

mba/jhe/cms

GOOGLE

Singapore Airlines

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Jakarta (AFP) Jan 26, 2026 - Indonesia has received its first three French-made Rafale fighter jets as part of a multibillion-dollar deal between the two countries, a defence ministry spokesman said Monday.

The jets are part of an $8.1 billion deal agreed in 2022 by then defence minister Prabowo Subianto to purchase 42 French-made Rafale fighters.

The three aircraft arrived in Indonesia on Friday and are currently at a military airbase in the Sumatran city of Pekanbaru, defence ministry spokesman Rico Ricardo Sirait said.

"The arrival of these Rafale (aircraft) is an important part of the modernisation of the Indonesian Air Force's defence equipment," Rico told AFP.

He added that the planes are "ready for use" by the air force as the administrative and technical handover process had been completed.

Prabowo, a former military general who was elected president in 2024, has sought to modernise Indonesia's ageing military assets.

In July 2025, Indonesia signed a contract with Turkey to buy 48 Kaan fighter jets.

During French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to Jakarta last year, his then-armed forces minister Sebastien Lecornu said Indonesia signed a letter of intent to purchase more Rafale jets from French company Dassault Aviation, without specifying figures or a timeline.

Indonesia also pledged to buy light frigates and Scorpene submarines, as well as Caesar howitzers and ammunition from French-German defence group KNDS, Lecornu wrote on X.

mrc/tc/mtp

Dassault Aviation

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jan 21, 2026 - Stratoship has signed a memorandum of understanding with Queensland based companies Orbit2Orbit and Sunburnt Space Co to build a staged lab to space pathway for small satellite payloads.

The agreement establishes a commercial framework that links laboratory development, stratospheric testing, very low Earth orbit and orbital missions into a coherent progression for customers.

Under the MoU, Orbit2Orbit will act as the payload integration layer across multiple spaceflight platforms, providing a cross compatible payload hosting system that allows hardware to move between stages without redesign.

In this framework, customers can advance payloads from laboratory testing to stratospheric validation on Stratoship platforms, then to suborbital and very low Earth orbit missions with Sunburnt Space Co before graduating to full orbital deployments.

This staged approach is delivered through Orbit2Orbit's Pathfinder program, which is structured to reduce technical risk, cost and time to flight by enabling payloads to be developed once and then matured incrementally.

Stratoship's initial stratospheric missions give payload operators real world system integration and operational validation under space like conditions, closing the gap between benchtop testing and space deployment.

By progressing through increasingly representative environments, payloads can be evaluated for performance and reliability without the repeated reintegration traditionally required at each mission phase.

The Pathfinder program offers test and evaluation opportunities for environmental verification, system qualification and sovereign technology validation without the expense and risk of direct to orbit launches.

Although anchored in Australia's rapidly growing space ecosystem, the program is structured to accommodate international partners seeking affordable and repeatable access to space like conditions and early orbital infrastructure pathways.

The collaboration positions Stratoship, Orbit2Orbit and Sunburnt Space Co as a coordinated conduit for payload developers looking to move from concept to orbit through a consistent, reusable integration architecture.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST New York (AFP) Jan 16, 2026 - US aviation authorities issued notices Friday warning airlines to "exercise caution" in the airspace over Mexico and Central America due to "military activities."

The Federal Aviation Administration posted a series of messages cautioning about a "potentially hazardous situation," citing the chance for interference to the Global Navigation Satellite System.

"The FAA issued flight advisory Notices to Airmen for specified areas of Mexico, Central America, Panama, Bogota, Guayaquil and Mazatlan Oceanic Flight Regions, and in airspace within the eastern Pacific Ocean," an FAA spokesperson said.

The advisory remains in effect for 60 days.

The announcement comes amid continued reverberations of a US special forces raid and airstrike on January 3 that captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores to face trial on drug-trafficking and other charges.

President Donald Trump has also suggested he is planning land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, in what would mark a provocative military action against a US neighbor and major trading partner.

"We are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico," Trump told Fox News last week.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Taipei (AFP) Jan 15, 2026 - Taiwan has located the black box of a F-16 fighter jet that apparently crashed into the sea last week, the Air Force said Thursday.

The single-seat F-16V disappeared off Taiwan's east coast on January 6, around 70 minutes after taking off for a routine night training mission.

The pilot, who remains missing, is believed to have ejected before the aircraft went down.

The Air Force said signals from the jet's flight data recorder, commonly known as the black box, had been "detected and accurately located".

"As for the search and rescue of personnel, despite continuous day and night searches by aircraft, ships, and coastal patrol personnel, no results have been found," it said in a statement.

The Air Force said it would commission a professional team to start salvaging the aircraft as soon as possible while efforts to find the pilot would continue.

Taiwan is upgrading its defence capabilities as China maintains military pressure on the democratic island, which Beijing claims is part of its territory.

China has stepped up military drills near the island, including large-scale exercises around Taiwan late last year.

Taipei has ordered 66 US-made F-16V jets -- a fourth-generation multi-role fighter -- to replace its ageing fleet.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Paris, France (AFP) Jan 14, 2026 - Hydrogen-powered airplanes, touted by some as a way to slash carbon emissions from flying, are unlikely to prove a viable technology anytime soon, the head of French engine maker Safran said Wednesday.

"Hydrogen in aviation is more for the 22nd century," Olivier Andries told a French parliament committee.

Pan-European planemaker Airbus has been working for years on putting a hydrogen plane into service in the 2040s, but acknowledged last year that progress had been slower than expected.

Burning hydrogen only produces water, which is why the aviation and automobile industries have looked at it as possibility to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from travel.

Safran, a major engine supplier to both Airbus and Boeing, already has engines that can be fuelled with hydrogen, Andries said.

But liquid hydrogen, even at -253 degrees Celsius (-423 F), takes up four times as much space as kerosene, which is what planes use at present.

That makes it impossible to use with current plane designs, while requiring billions of euros of investment in hydrogen storage infrastructure at airports worldwide.

"You cannot only come up with ideas that are incompatible with today's ecosystem," Andries told lawmakers.

He also cast doubt on calls to impose limits on flying to curb emissions, as the air transport sector aims to cut its 2005 pollution emission levels in half by 2050.

More than five billion people travelled by plane last year, he said, and revenue for the global airline industry is already 20 percent higher than pre-Covid levels.

"The trend is very strong, whether you like it or not," he said, citing as an example India's rapidly emerging middle class which "yearns to fly".

"Are environmental concerns having an impact on global air traffic growth? I'm not seeing it," he said.

neo/tq/js

Safran

Airbus Group

BOEING

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Stockholm (AFP) Jan 11, 2026 - Sweden will invest 15 billion kronor ($1.6 billion) on bolstering its air defences, notably potential civilian targets, the government said Sunday, the latest European country to beef up military spending since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The money will go to ground-based aerial defence systems, the government said, as Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the United States' increasingly strained ties with NATO allies under US President Donald Trump prompt a European rush to rearm.

"Experience from Ukraine demonstrates the importance of a robust air defence," the Swedish government said.

The announcement follows similar moves by countries including Germany, where parliament approved $59 billion in new defence spending in December.

The initial purchases under Sweden's new plan will be made in the first quarter of 2026, the government said.

"With this broad investment in air defence, we are protecting the whole of society, from our military units to urban areas and critical infrastructure," Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said in a statement.

"It is a matter of people's lives, our freedom and our ability to withstand attacks in all parts of the country."

Sweden had announced in November it was spending around $366 million on IRIS-T surface-to-air short-range missiles to protect itself against missiles, drones and combat aircraft.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Taipei (AFP) Jan 8, 2026 - Taiwan has temporarily grounded its fleet of F-16 fighter jets for inspection, the defence minister said Thursday, as the search continued for a pilot whose aircraft apparently crashed into the sea.

The pilot is believed to have ejected from his single-seat F-16V off Taiwan's east coast on Tuesday around 70 minutes after taking off for a routine training mission, according to the Air Force.

Thirty aircraft, 22 naval and coast guard vessels, and two drones have been deployed to check the waters, while a ground search is also underway, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said.

"Our only goal right now is to do everything we can to conduct the search and rescue operation," Koo told reporters in the parliamentary compound.

Koo said combat exercise and training missions have been suspended for the inspection of F-16s, but "alert and standby duties will be maintained."

"This inspection should be completed by Saturday. This will not create any gaps in air defences," he said.

Taiwan is upgrading its defence capabilities as China maintains military pressure on the democratic island, which Beijing claims is part of its territory.

The island has ordered 66 US F-16V -- a fourth-generation multi-role fighter -- that is a significantly upgraded version of Taiwan's ageing F-16 A/B jets.

Taiwan completed upgrades of 141 older F-16s to the V standard in late 2023.

The aircraft were due to be delivered in 2026, but Koo said recently that would be "challenging".

Koo told lawmakers on Thursday that 56 aircraft have already been assembled on the production line, but he did not reply when asked how many could be delivered in the first half of this year.

China has in recent years ramped up incursions by fighter jets and warships around Taiwan -- actions that military experts dub as grey-zone tactics that serve to exhaust the island's armed forces.

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Cambridge MA (MIT) Jan 07, 2026 - Waiting in an airport for a connecting flight is often tedious. A new study by MIT researchers shows it's bad for business, too.

Looking at air travel and multinational firm formation over a 30-year period, the researchers measured how much a strong network of airline connections matters for economic growth. They found that multinational firms are more likely to locate their subsidiaries in cities they can reach with direct flights, and that this trend is particularly pronounced in knowledge industries. The degree to which a city is embedded within a larger network of high-use flights matters notably for business expansion too.

The team examined 142 countries over the period from 1993 through 2023 and concluded that pairs of cities reachable only by flights with one stopover had 20 percent fewer multinational firm subsidiaries than cities with direct flights. If two changes of planes were needed to connect cities, they had 34 percent fewer subsidiaries. That equates to 1.8 percent and 3.0 percent fewer new firms per year, respectively.

"What we found is how much it matters for a city to be embedded within the global air transportation network," says Ambra Amico, an MIT researcher and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results. "And we also highlight the importance of this for knowledge-intensive business sectors."

Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of the paper, adds: "We found a very strong empirical result about the relationship of parent and subsidiary firms, and how much connectivity matters. The important role that connectivity plays to facilitate face-to-face interactions, build trust, and reduce information asymmetry between such firms is crucial."

The paper, "Air Connectivity Boosts Urban Attractiveness for Global Firms," is published in Nature Cities.

The co-authors are Amico, a postdoc at the MIT-Singapore Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); Fabio Duarte, associate director of MIT's Senseable City Lab; Wen-Chi Liao, a visiting associate professor at the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) and an associate professor at NUS Business School at the National University of Singapore; and Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at CRE and MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

The study analyzes 7.5 million firms in 800 cities with airports, comprising a total of over 400,000 international flight routes. The research focused only on multinational firms, and thus international flights, excluding domestic flights in large countries.

To conduct the analysis and build their new database, the researchers used flight data from the International Civil Aviation Organization as well as firm data from the Orbis database, run by Moody's, which has company data for over 469 million firms globally. That includes ownership data, allowing the researchers to track relationships between companies. The study included firms located within 37 miles (60 kilometers) of an airport, and accounted for additional factors influencing new-firm location, including city size.

By analyzing industry types, the researchers observed that air connectivity matters relatively more in knowledge industries, such as finance, where face-to-face activity seems to matter more. Alternately, a knowledge-industry firm with auditors periodically showing up to conduct work can lower costs by being more reachable.

"We were fascinated by the heterogenity across industries," Liao says. "The results are intuitive, but it surprised us that the pattern is so consistent. If the nature of the industy requires face-to-face interaction, air connectivity matters more." By contrast, for manufacturing, he notes, road infrastructure and ocean shipping will matter relatively more.

To be sure, there are multiple ways to define how connected a city is within the global air transportation network, and the study examines how specific measures relate to firm growth. One measure is what the paper calls "degree centrality," or how many other places a city is connected to by direct flights. Over a 10-year period, a 10 percent increase in a city's degree centrality leads to a 4.3 percent increase in the number of subsidiaries located there.

However, another kind of connectedness is even more strongly associated with subsidiary growth. It's not just how many cities one place is linked to, but in turn, how many direct connections those linked cities themselves have. This turns out to be the strongest predictor of subsidiary growth.

"What matters is not just how many neighbor \[directly linked\] cities you have," Duarte says. "It's important to choose strategically which ones you're connected to, as well. If you tell me who you are connected to, I tell you how successful your city will be."

Intriguingly, the relationship between direct flights and multinational firm growth patterns has held up throughout the 30-year study period, despite the rise of teleconferencing, the Covid-19 pandemic, shifts in global growth, and other factors.

"There is consistency across a 30-year period, which is not something to underestimate," Amico says. "We needed face-to-face interaction 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and we need it now, despite all the big changes we have seen."

Indeed, Zheng adds, "Ironically, I think even with trade and geopolitical frictions, it's more and more important to have face-to-face interactions to build trust for global trade and business. You still need to reach an actual place and see your business partners, so air connectivity really influences how global business copes with global uncertainties."

The research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore within the Office of the Prime Minister of Singapore, under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program, and the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative.

Research Report: Air Connectivity Boosts Urban Attractiveness for Global Firms

]]> Sat, 07 FEB 2026 10:16:09 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D