Blue Spirit Aero’s insect-like hydrogen-powered Dragonfly is making its first appearance on the ground at the Paris air show, and the French start-up hopes that the aircraft will participate in flying demonstrations over Le Bourget in 2027.

That is how rapidly the light trainer’s development programme is progressing, according to Florian Pasquiet, Blue Spirit’s head of structure and design. He tells FlightGlobal on 18 June that the Toulouse-based company recently started taxi-testing and hydrogen gas refuelling with the demonstrator.

Flight-testing will begin later this year or in the first quarter of 2026, he says. 

“It’s a light, hydrogen-powered aircraft, a four-seater for the plane school market,” Pasquiet says. “And it has a particular shape, as you can see, with the distributed-electric propulsion. We have 12 of these powertrains that we call pods, and each of them has its own storage of hydrogen.”

The pods are independent from one another, meaning “there is no single point of failure”, and are easily replaced and refilled for fast turnaround times.

“If one pod was to fail, we can drop it and replace it, reducing the down time of the aircraft,” Pasquiet says.

A dozen wing-mounted propellers also provide a “blown-lift” effect in which air flow is accelerated over the aircraft’s wings, allowing for short take-off capabilities. 

Blue Spirit’s approach differs from most hydrogen-electric start-ups in that they are not “on-boarding hydrogen inside the aircraft”, he says, and the company has opted to use gaseous hydrogen fuel.

“There is no mobile filling station for liquid hydrogen; for gaseous hydrogen, it exists,” he says. “It has been used on cars many times.”

Though Blue Spirit is focused for now on the trainer market, it plans to introduce a six-seater than will be aimed at the burgeoning regional air mobility sector, and Pasquiet says the design could be scaled up to 19-seat aircraft.