Farnborough, United Kingdom, 22 July 2026 – Airbus, with partners from across the European Union, the UK and the US, is pursuing its ambition to pioneer a hybrid-electric non-propulsive energy architecture for the next generation of commercial aircraft with LEIA - Large Scale Integration Demonstrator of Hybrid Electrical Architecture.
LEIA, a project supported by the European Union Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking, will be fundamental to advancing high-voltage generation and distribution for innovative electrical aircraft systems for short-to-medium range aircraft. By bridging the gap between component-level innovation and aircraft-level maturity, the project aims to prepare these technologies for future integration and certification.
"Our progress in developing hybrid-electric technologies and our move into the LEIA demonstrator marks a pivotal shift in how we design the future of flight," said Karim Mokaddem, Head of aircraft of tomorrow Research and Technology at Airbus. "By moving to integrated, intelligent hybrid-electric architectures, we are actively laying the physical and digital foundation for the next generation of aircraft. This evolution demonstrates that the future of aviation is about more than just new power sources; it is also about the new ecosystems that will manage them." (....)