As Airbus presses ahead with ambitious plans to bring hydrogen-powered airliners into commercial service through its ZeroE program, the aircraft manufacturer is eyeing several major airports in North America as locations for potential “hydrogen hubs.”

Archer Aviation is partnering with Etihad Aviation Training to recruit and train pilots to fly the California-based company’s Midnight eVTOL aircraft in the United Arab Emirates. Archer and EAT announced the partnership on May 20 at the opening of the Future Aviation Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where the four-passenger Midnight air taxi is on display.

A pair of prominent eVTOL aircraft developers, Eve Air Mobility and Joby Aviation, this week announced new partnerships in Saudi Arabia. The deals covering aircraft sales and plans for maintenance and assembly support follow a flurry of recently signed agreements aimed at establishing eVTOL services in the neighboring UAE. They are further evidence of the Gulf region’s ambitions to be an early adopter of advanced air mobility.

Heart Aerospace is opening a research and development hub in the U.S. as it steps up work on its 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner. Announcing the move this week, the Sweden-based company said the new facility will support the ES-30 program as it starts a new phase of hardware testing.

Lilium is building a certification test facility for its eVTOL aircraft and expects it to be operational in late summer. The 26,000-sq-ft rig at its Munich headquarters has been designed with the company’s engineering partner Segula Technologies and will be used for integration and certification testing of the Lilium Jet.

Airbus is about to receive an auxiliary power unit (APU) customized by H3 Dynamics to run on a 500-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell. The European aerospace group plans to use the demonstrator unit to replace a conventional APU on a 400-seat A330 airline for test flights.

Textron’s eAviation division has acquired Amazilia Aerospace, a German company that specializes in digital flight controls and vehicle management systems. In a statement issued on May 15, Textron eAviation said it now holds “substantially all the assets” of Amazilia, which employs about 30 people at its facilities in Munich.

Aircraft manufacturers have long used so-called iron bird ground test rigs to fine-tune multiple elements of their design and systems before (but also during) the flight test stage. In this video, Boeing subsidiary Wisk explains how this approach is so important to its plans to bring an autonomous eVTOL aircraft to market.