Airbus selected Farnborough International Airshow 2026 to report on the successful progression of its efforts to electrify several non-propulsive functions within commercial aircraft.
The European aircraft manufacturer is working on this endeavor with a number of prominent industry partners (Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, GKN Aerospace, and MTU Aero Engines among others) to integrate a number of advanced electrical components in the architecture of commercial aircraft and manage the distribution of electric power to run multiple internal processes within the airframe. These include scalable motor/generators, next-generation electronic controllers, and power distribution equipment, among others.
This will materialize in LEIA (Large Scale Integration Demonstrator of Hybrid Electrical Architecture), a €35 million project supported by the European Union Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking, to decarbonize aviation through the increased use of electrical systems for short-to-medium range aircraft.
On July 22, 2026, Airbus announced that the first stage of this program, called SWITCH, has already been completed, following the successful integrated laboratory testing of powertrain subsystems by Collins Aerospace.
The program isready to transition to the next stage, which will be conducted at the Airbus Sustainable Technology and Engineering Projects (STEP) laboratory in Ottobrunn, Germany, and will involve aircraft-level integration testing, rather than testing the different subsystems separately.
This stage of the program will culminate in a pivotal ground demonstration before the end of 2027.