Hydrogen in Aerospace Clean Contrails and the Orient Express

Hydrogen in Aerospace Clean Contrails and the Orient Express 

To interested observers, it appeared that the Soviet Union was gearing up to develop hydrogen-fueled aviation and that it had a leg up over the West in exploring this new technology. Maybe it was only old-style communist propaganda, but both TASS and the party newspaper Izvestia implied that aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid natural gas were going to be the wave of the socialist future. 

The Soviet feat caused muted anguish in Washington among the few lawmakers who supported the development of hydrogen energy technology. Tupolev s triumph was yet another case in which the US had stood idly by in a critical area of research and allowed other nations to move far ahead,  

Presumably unbeknownst to Senator Matsunaga when he made his speech, an American aviation pioneer and veteran pilot was quietly getting ready to claim the hydrogen aviation spotlight (or at least a small part of it) for the United States. Working almost alone, William Conrad, an octogenarian 

Conrad, who had spent about 100,000 on the project (including 26,000 of his own money for the plane itself), said that he just wanted to establish the fact that the United States has the first plane to run solely on hydrogen. The purpose, he added, was to get a little publicity in order to make people realize that hydrogen is available and that it is a nonpolluting form of energy. 4 

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