Airbus has lifted the curtain just a tad and given us a glimpse at the future of commercial aviation. At the Airbus Summit 2025 in Toulouse, the company presented a view of the technology that will create the single-aisle airliner of tomorrow.
Pinning down what the airlines of the next decade will look like is both very easy and nearly impossible at the same time.
With over a century and a quarter of development behind us, aerospace science and technology are pretty well established, as is the basic idea of what a commercial airliner looks like. It hasn’t changed very much at all since the introduction of the jet engine in the 1950s.
On the other hand, aeronautics is far from a done deal. There’s still a lot of room for technology to benefit from new tools, materials, and ideas. While the airliner of the 2030s might still look like the boring old cylinder-and-wings template that appeared in the 1930s, it can still benefit from remarkable innovations.
Future Airliner
The problem for the predictors is that what these innovations will be is far from certain and how these innovations interact with things like the marketplace, regulations, and the infrastructure that supports the air industry makes predictions so difficult that if I could do so with any certainty, I’d be down the casino making a fortune playing Baccarat.
That being said, Airbus gave the public a glimpse of the future single-aisle passenger plane based on what the company is developing through its various projects. The presentation was frustratingly short on details, but it did provide some insights into what may be coming as well as clarification of Airbus’s decision to slow-walk its hydrogen-powered airliner.
Airbus
According to the company, the next generation of Airbus airliners will feature wings that mimic those of birds, making them lighter, thinner and longer. Based on work done at Airbus’s Wing Technology Development Centre at Filton, England, which is home to the Wing of Tomorrow (WoT) research and technology program, the new wings will produce more lift for less drag. To offset these extra-long wings, they will be foldable, so the new planes will be able to use existing airport gates.
Another innovation is a new jet engine that Airbus is working on. The Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines (RISE) open fan engine demonstrator replaces the present turbofan and cowling of modern jet engines with an open turbofan that is larger and sits out in the open. This is claimed to reduce fuel consumption by 20% compared to present engines and will be able to run on sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) at blends of up to 100%.
Along with new engines, Airbus wants to introduce hybridization, with lithium-ion or solid-state batteries and high voltage systems being used not only for propulsion, but as a way to run onboard functions like the air conditioning system or lighting, which would also reduce fuel consumption.
Airbus
Another area is materials. Airbus wants to move away from Carbon-Fibrer Reinforced Plastics (CFRP) in favor of Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastic Polymer Composites (CFRTP). This new material is an improvement of CFRPs because it can be reshaped and reprocessed after forming, can be manufactured faster, has higher impact resistance, is recyclable and remoldable, and has lower processing costs.
The future airliner will also move more into the digital realm with systems that are highly connected and automated, with the ability to instantly update itself and with increased data processing speeds. In addition, new automatic assistance systems will make flying safer and help pilots to handle complex tasks with less distraction.
But why isn’t the future Airbus airliner running on hydrogen? At the Summit, Airbus explained that it ran the numbers and found that, while it could build a successful hydrogen airliner, the plane would be successful in the same way that Concorde was successful. In other words, a technological triumph, but a commercial failure.
The market simply isn’t ready for hydrogen planes. The regulatory framework isn’t there, nor is the hydrogen economy to provide the green or gold hydrogen fuel, so while the new iteration of the 100-seat, 1,000-nm-range (1,150 miles, 1,850 km) ZEROe hydrogen liner is more advanced, with six engines instead of four, it will remain in development for now.
“Hydrogen is at the heart of our commitment to decarbonize aviation,” Airbus Head of Future Programmes Bruno Fichefeux. “While we’ve adjusted our roadmap, our dedication to hydrogen-powered flight is unwavering. Just as we saw in the automotive sector, fully electric aircraft powered by hydrogen fuel cells have the potential in the longer term to revolutionize air transport for the better, complementing the sustainable aviation fuel pathway.”
Source: Airbus