The Problem

Aviation is among the hardest sectors of the modern economy to decarbonize, and demand for flight worldwide is projected to explode in the coming decades. How to manage this growth while also freeing the industry from fossil fuel dependence is one of the great unanswered questions of the green energy transition. Major industrial nations are racing to research and deploy zero-emission aircraft, but the United States is not one of them. Because flight cannot simply be banned, aviation's carbon has to be either captured after the fact or never emitted at all. Carbon removal at the scale aviation requires remains unproven. The only viable path is zero-emission technology.

Jet fuel holds far more energy per kilogram than any battery on the market. Replacing it means solving different problems for different flight distances. Today's batteries can power short regional flights of roughly 100 to 250 miles, with hybrid-electric configurations stretching that further. That covers commuter routes and island-hopping. Medium and long-haul flights are a much harder problem. Batteries already make up a large share of an electric aircraft's weight — roughly a third to over half in current designs, with the Eviation Alice's pack reaching about 60 percent of takeoff weight. A battery pack large enough to power a longer trip would weigh so much that the plane could not take off. Next-generation chemistries — solid-state, lithium-sulfur, and advanced silicon-anode — could change that math, but none has yet reached commercial passenger service. Green hydrogen can power long-haul flight today in principle, but the aircraft and airport infrastructure for it do not yet exist at commercial scale.

Recognizing both the need to quit fossil fuels and the immense economic opportunity, governments across the globe are attacking these technical challenges. China's published hydrogen aviation roadmap sets staged development goals around regional aircraft by 2035 and mainline aircraft by 2050. In April 2026, the country flew a 7.5-ton unmanned hydrogen-powered demonstrator aircraft. Japan has committed over $100 million specifically to aircraft hydrogen fuel cell R&D as part of a ¥2 trillion (~$16 billion) Green Innovation Fund underwriting the country's next-generation aerospace push. The EU has allocated over 100 million euros for hydrogen aviation architectures, and the UK has committed over a hundred million pounds. The United States has no comparable program. NASA's hydrogen aviation work remains at the research and analysis stage on small budgets, while the Trump administration has cancelled the broader DOE hydrogen initiatives — including the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub — that could have anchored the sector.

The private aerospace giants the country would normally count on to build the future have walked away from it. Airbus has pushed its hydrogen airliner years past its original 2035 target and scaled the program back. Boeing has bet on sustainable fuels and conventional designs instead. The blue-chip manufacturers treat zero-emission flight as too risky, too capital-hungry, and too far off to build now, and after decades of consolidation and stock buybacks they no longer carry the appetite for a generational engineering gamble. Waiting for the incumbents to change their minds is not a plan. If the United States wants the next aircraft, it will have to build the builders.

The Mission

The Mission for America will rebuild the country's aerospace industry around a generation-defining moonshot: replacing every carbon-powered flight with clean, American-built aircraft. The president will begin the movement with a public address reminding the nation that aviation is one of the most consequential achievements of American industrial policy, the result of close collaboration between government and private business that produced nationwide prosperity and decades of global leadership. The Mission will revive that partnership for the age of clean flight, but it will not hand the job to incumbents who have already abandoned it. It will build the builders directly: a network of new public corporations, chartered and capitalized by the RFC, racing each other to deliver the world's first zero-emission long-haul aircraft and the hundreds of thousands of high-wage manufacturing and engineering jobs that come with rebuilding the industry around it.

This is a state-led infrastructure project in the American tradition. The transcontinental railroad, the interstate highways, and the original jet age were all built when the federal government decided a piece of national infrastructure was too important to leave to private markets. Clean aviation is that kind of project. The country that invented the airplane will treat clean aviation the way it once treated the railroad: as public infrastructure.

By the end of the decade, that country will be prepared to launch the world's first commercial zero-emission long-haul aviation network, and American-built electric planes will already serve short-haul routes across the country.

The heart of the long-haul effort is not a single national champion and not a contract handed to Boeing. It is three competing public corporations, each chartered under the RFC, each fully funded, each racing to build a working zero-emission long-haul aircraft first. They share every result with each other and with private startups, universities, and allied partners, so the whole field advances at the pace of its best performer while three independent teams take three independent shots at the hardest engineering problem in aviation. If one stalls, fails, or bets wrong, the mission does not stall with it. The president will make this race a signature commitment of the campaign and the administration.

The Mission will not wait a decade for a finished passenger jet and hope it works. It will build in public, one aircraft at a time. The corporations will start with unmanned hydrogen-powered freight drones, the lowest-stakes way to fly the technology for real, and hit a more capable benchmark every year: bigger payloads, longer range, then piloted cargo aircraft, and finally passenger flight. Each year produces a real aircraft that really flies, the supply chain and the workforce grow with it, and the whole country can watch the progress. A full-scale zero-emission long-haul prototype will be in ground testing before the first term ends, and the passenger network follows on a ten-year arc.

Honesty is part of the plan. Hydrogen flight may not work out. The storage problem may prove too stubborn, or the economics may never close. If hydrogen fails and battery breakthroughs do not arrive either, then the country will simply have to fly less and lean harder on the trains and buses the Mission is building anyway. We acknowledge that outcome plainly, and we are not planning for it. We are planning to win. The whole point of running three teams, iterating in public, and keeping every other clean-transport option moving in parallel is to give the country every chance to make zero-emission flight real, while telling the truth about the odds.

The military will be the first customer for hydrogen freight and tanker aircraft, de-risking the technology the way it did for the original jet engine. NASA's aeronautics labs and wind tunnels, the federal backbone of American aviation R&D, will be expanded to feed all three corporations. And because the public is paying to build this industry from nothing, the public owns it: the corporations are public, the patents they generate are public, and the licensing and royalty revenue from selling the American aircraft and its airport systems worldwide flows back to the people who carried the risk.

According to many experts, hydrogen power is the most promising option for totally decarbonizing long-haul aviation, but significant questions remain. The goal of the Mission is to replace carbon-powered flight, not to lock in any one standard. So the Mission will run a parallel push on high-capacity batteries, advancing the chemistry, the domestic manufacturing base, and the critical-mineral supply chain together. A dedicated Manhattan Project for batteries will drive the energy-density breakthroughs, the Mission for Industry will stand up the domestic manufacturing base, and a national effort to secure the raw materials the whole transition depends on will lock down the critical-mineral supply chain. If batteries advance faster than expected, or if hydrogen runs into unforeseen problems, the corporations' industrial base will pivot. Future MFA updates will revise the technology mix as the data comes in. The commitment to the goal does not change: zero-emission flights in American-built aircraft.

On a faster timeline, the Mission will establish a domestic regional electric aircraft industry. The RFC will take equity stakes in the most promising American manufacturers, finance the factories that take them to production volume, and place the first fleet orders for federal regional travel. The FAA will stand up an expedited certification pathway for electric aircraft, modeled on the streamlined processes used for military and experimental aviation. Within five years, certified American-built electric aircraft will fly the short-haul commuter routes today served by aging turboprops burning jet fuel, and by the end of the decade every major U.S. commercial airport will have high-power charging infrastructure ready to turn them around as fast as a refueling stop.

Until the new electric and long-haul fleets are ready, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) will help bridge the gap in existing aircraft. SAF is clean liquid fuel that blends with conventional jet fuel, and current aircraft can burn the mix at up to 50 percent SAF without engine modifications. The RFC will finance airlines that retrofit their fleets for higher SAF blends and a diversified domestic SAF industry to supply them, so the existing long-haul fleet starts burning cleaner fuel years before the first zero-emission jet is ready.

Public transport will be the silent partner. The MFA's massive investments in conventional rail, high-speed rail, and intercity bus service, detailed in the Mission for Public Transport, will absorb a significant share of short-haul flight demand that does not need aircraft at all, freeing the aviation industry to focus on routes where flight is genuinely the right mode.

With the tools and tactics laid out in this chapter, the Mission for Aviation will end the toxic carbon emissions from flight, free the country from a volatile global jet fuel supply chain, and establish the United States as a leading producer of the clean-aviation technology that will define travel in the 21st century.

Solutions

Solution 1: Build the World's First Zero-Emission Long-Haul Aircraft

The Mission will build the world's first commercial zero-emission long-haul aircraft and the industry that grows up around it. Rather than contracting the job out to incumbents who have walked away from it, the RFC will charter and capitalize a network of new public corporations to take on the hardest engineering problem in aviation directly, racing each other and sharing everything, and deliver the aircraft, the production capacity, and the airport infrastructure as one movement.

Hydrogen first; the door stays open. Green hydrogen aviation fuel is made by splitting water molecules with clean electricity in machines called electrolyzers. The resulting hydrogen is chilled to roughly -253°C, turning it into a super-cold liquid that holds far more energy per unit volume than the gas form. Stored in heavily insulated tanks at the airport, the liquid is transferred into aircraft by specialized refueling trucks. Once on board, modified jet turbines or onboard fuel cells convert the hydrogen into thrust, exhausting only water vapor instead of carbon. Green ammonia is more stable than pure hydrogen for both storage and shipping. It liquefies at a more manageable -33°C, moves through existing fertilizer infrastructure, and can be cracked back to hydrogen at the airport when needed. Liquid hydrogen takes up several times the volume of jet fuel for the same energy, so the aircraft itself has to change shape, which turns out to be an opportunity as much as a constraint (see the next section). The hardest engineering problems are safe, leak-proof, energy-efficient liquid-hydrogen storage and the airframe redesign that goes with it, and they are exactly the problems the public corporations exist to solve. While this solution currently focuses on hydrogen, if parallel battery research delivers breakthroughs that make extended-range electric flight viable on medium- and long-haul routes, the corporations and the Department of Defense will pivot the industrial base toward electric.

A leap in aircraft design: the flying wing. The hydrogen aircraft will not look like the tube-with-wings every airliner has been for seventy years. To carry the bulky liquid-hydrogen tanks, the corporations will build "flying wings," also called blended-wing-body aircraft: a single smooth lifting body, shaped a little like a manta ray or the B-2 bomber, where the whole aircraft generates lift instead of just the wings bolted to its sides. The shape is not a styling choice. It is the biggest leap in how well an airplane flies in generations. A blended wing burns roughly 20 to 30 percent less energy than a conventional jet of the same size, and the leading designs project as much as 50 percent less per passenger. That efficiency gain matters twice over: it is a huge saving even on ordinary fuel, and it means the clean hydrogen does not have to stretch nearly as far to make long-haul flight work.

It is also a far better airplane to ride in. Instead of a narrow tube with a single aisle, the wide body opens into something closer to a room: more personal space in every class, larger seats, an overhead bin for every passenger, wider doors and faster boarding, and a quieter cabin, because the engines ride on top of the body where the structure shields their noise from the ground. None of this is science fiction or a foreign project. NASA and Boeing flew a research version, the X-48, years ago, and the American startup JetZero, backed by the U.S. Air Force and United Airlines, is building a full-scale demonstrator in North Carolina to fly in 2027. The military wants the design for its tankers and transports; the Mission's public corporations will carry it the rest of the way to a hydrogen passenger aircraft.

The catch is on the ground. A wide blended body, and the weight of a fully fueled long-haul hydrogen aircraft, do not slot neatly into airports built for narrow tube-and-wing jets. The largest versions will want longer runways, gates and jet bridges reconfigured for the broader body, and new boarding flows that load through several doors at once rather than funneling everyone down one aisle. That is one more reason the Mission builds a new generation of airports alongside the aircraft (below), rather than bolting the future onto infrastructure designed for the past.

A network of three competing public corporations. The Mission will charter three public corporations under the RFC, each fully capitalized, each chartered to build a zero-emission long-haul aircraft, each racing to do it first. This is the RFC's parallel-public-corporation model: instead of one national champion or one prime contractor, several public companies compete on transparent benchmarks (payload, range, cost, safety, schedule) and improve at the pace of the best among them. The country has done exactly this before. During World War II the original RFC financed competing aluminum producers — Reynolds and Kaiser against the Alcoa monopoly — and competing aircraft makers, and supply exploded. The Mission for Housing is building the same way today, through a set of competing regional American Building Corporations. Three teams is the right number for aviation: enough for a real race and real redundancy, few enough that each is funded to win rather than starved. They operate like disciplined private companies, run by aerospace operators and engineers rather than career bureaucrats, but they are owned by the public and accountable to the mission. Where private startups can move faster on a piece of the problem, the corporations will partner with them and fund them too. The point is not to protect a public monopoly; it is to make the aircraft exist.

Funded for results, the way NASA funded SpaceX. Public ownership does not mean a blank check. The corporations are paid on the COTS model — the fixed-price, milestone-based structure NASA used to get SpaceX and other newcomers flying for a fraction of the traditional cost. Instead of a cost-plus contract that reimburses every overrun and quietly rewards delay, the RFC sets the goal and pays a fixed amount only when a corporation actually hits a published benchmark: the first freight drone to carry a given payload, the first piloted cargo flight, the first full-scale prototype in ground testing. Money follows performance. The teams that hit their marks earn the next tranche and more of the work; the teams that fall behind get restructured, restaffed, or merged into the ones that are winning. This is the discipline that keeps a public corporation from turning into a slow, padded bureaucracy: it has to deliver a real aircraft to get paid, and two rivals are right behind it. The race and the milestone money together do the job that the threat of bankruptcy does for a private firm, without handing the upside to private shareholders.

Open research, shared by everyone. Everything the public pays to discover is public. The three corporations share all of their research, test data, and intellectual property with each other, and with private startups, universities, and allied governments working toward the same goal. A breakthrough at one corporation is not a trade secret to be hoarded; it is a national asset that immediately raises the whole field. This open-source model is the opposite of the patent thickets that let incumbents sit on technology for decades, and it is how a public effort outruns a private one: three teams plus every startup in the country, all building on each other's best work in real time.

Iterative development, freight drones first. The corporations will not spend ten years designing a finished passenger jet behind closed doors and unveil it at the end. They will build iteratively and in public, the way the synthetic rubber program went from research to a continent of factories in eighteen months. The first aircraft will be unmanned hydrogen-powered freight drones, the lowest-risk way to fly the real technology, with no passengers aboard while the storage, propulsion, and handling systems are proven. Each corporation will hit a published benchmark every year: more payload, more range, then piloted freight aircraft, then the leap to passengers. Annual milestones keep all three teams honest, give the public a visible drumbeat of progress, and let the supply chain and the workforce scale alongside the aircraft instead of waiting for a finished design. Freight first is also a market first: cargo operators and the military will fly these aircraft commercially years before the first passenger boards one.

Public capital, public upside. The public is underwriting the hardest engineering program in aviation, and it owns what that investment creates. The corporations are public, so the upside is public by design: the federal government holds the equity, owns the rights to the technology its dollars develop, and captures the licensing and royalty revenue as the American aircraft and its airport systems are sold worldwide. The RFC stays flexible on structure — direct capitalization of the public corporations, equity stakes in the private startups it funds alongside them, low-cost loans, or a blend, whatever gets the aircraft built fastest. Where the Mission funds a private firm rather than building inside a public corporation, the RFC drives a hard bargain for the taxpayer rather than handing over the upside for free. The returns flow back to the American people who carried the risk.

Workforce pipeline with the Mission for Workforce Development. The aircraft, the airport hydrogen hubs, and the operations that follow need two distinct labor forces. One is the scientific and engineering pipeline of aerospace engineers, materials scientists, propulsion specialists, and fuel-cell researchers, trained at universities and national labs. The other is the unionized installation and operations workforce of pipefitters, electricians, electrolyzer operators, cryogenic technicians, and airport ground crews who will build the airport hydrogen and charging infrastructure and keep it running. The Mission for Workforce Development will coordinate both pipelines with the public corporations, the federal training centers, and the building trades unions so the people are trained and credentialed before the equipment arrives.

Hydrogen infrastructure and a new generation of airports. Hydrogen-powered flight needs cryogenic liquid hydrogen or green ammonia stored, handled, and delivered on site at any airport serving these aircraft, and over time it needs airports built for the job. The RFC will finance the airport-side storage and refueling infrastructure at lead U.S. hubs, plus on-site green hydrogen production at the hubs where the land, the load, and the local renewable supply make it the right call. The Mission will actively recruit host cities that have abundant clean electricity and water, the two ingredients for making hydrogen, to become the country's hydrogen aviation hubs, bringing the jobs and the investment with them. Hubs without on-site production will be supplied by pipeline or truck from the larger production facilities serving shipping and fertilizer. As the fleet matures, the Mission will build a new generation of airports designed around clean flight from the ground up: long runways for fully loaded hydrogen aircraft, on-site hydrogen production, and high-speed rail connections that link the airport directly to the city center, so the trip from downtown to the gate is fast and the airport is an engine of regional development rather than a parking lot at the edge of town. The network will start with the top U.S. hubs and expand alongside the commercial hydrogen fleet on a decade-plus timeline.

A global industry grown around the American aircraft. Long-haul zero-emission aviation will be the next multi-hundred-billion-dollar aerospace market. The same public corporations that deliver the American aircraft will license the technology, export airport infrastructure designs, and anchor a global supply chain running through U.S. factories. American firms will also partner directly with foreign airports to retrofit their hydrogen handling, storage, and refueling systems so they can accept the new American fleet. This is how American aerospace built the original jet age: American planes flying to American-designed airports around the world, fueled and serviced with American equipment. The Mission will run the same playbook for the next generation, with the public holding the patents this time.

Green hydrogen supply. Hydrogen-powered aviation depends on green hydrogen reaching roughly $2/kg, down from today's typical unsubsidized range of roughly $3 to $8/kg, with the best-resource regions already near the low end. The MFA will substantially step up green hydrogen production first for shipping and fertilizer, where demand is immediate and the technology is closer to ready. The guaranteed offtake from those sectors will pull production costs down and let further applications, including aviation, take hold.

Expand NASA aeronautics. NASA's aeronautics research is a small fraction of its space program, even though its labs and wind tunnels have historically been the federal backbone of American aviation R&D. The Mission will substantially expand NASA aeronautics to feed all three public corporations: airframe design, propulsion testing, materials science, and certification, with the results shared across the whole field.

Is ultra-high-speed passenger flight eventually possible? It is worth answering plainly, because people ask. Yes, ultra-fast passenger flight is technically possible, and it is closer than it has been in a generation. Concorde already proved supersonic passenger service works; it was retired in 2003 for economics and noise, not physics. The barrier that grounded it over land, the sonic boom, is now falling: in June 2026, NASA's X-59 demonstrator flew faster than sound while producing a soft "thump" instead of a window-rattling boom, and the House has passed a bill directing the FAA to lift the 53-year overland supersonic ban for aircraft that make no boom on the ground. Private efforts like Boom's Overture are pushing supersonic passenger flight back toward service. The honest catch for this Mission is that all of that progress runs on conventional or sustainable jet fuel, and going fast is the enemy of going clean: supersonic flight burns far more energy per passenger, and a carbon-free supersonic aircraft, with hydrogen's bulky tanks crammed into a needle-thin high-speed airframe, is a far harder problem than carbon-free subsonic flight. So the Mission's commercial line stays subsonic and zero-emission, where the climate math and the engineering actually close. Ultra-high-speed and hypersonic flight stay in the federal research portfolio, carried as a frontier R&D line in the Manhattan Projects, so the United States keeps a hand in the technology that could define the generation of aircraft after this one, without betting the clean-aviation mission on it.

What this delivers: The world's first commercial zero-emission long-haul aircraft, built in America by a network of competing public corporations (primary path: hydrogen, with extended-range electric held in reserve through the parallel Manhattan Projects battery program), reached by iterating from unmanned freight drones to piloted passenger flight over the decade. Open, shared research that lifts every American team and startup at once. Hydrogen handling and refueling at the lead U.S. hub airports, a new generation of clean-built airports linked to cities by high-speed rail, and a global aerospace industry anchored in the United States with the public holding the patents and the upside.

Solution 2: Build a Regional Electric Aircraft Industry

A domestic electric aircraft industry is the near-term cornerstone of the next era of American aviation. If the Manhattan Projects battery breakthroughs arrive on schedule, it will also be the foundation of a much larger long-haul electric fleet. The RFC will stand the industry up from scratch, financing factories, certifying aircraft, and supplying the first regional electric fleet in commercial service anywhere in the world.

Scope: ultra-short-haul, 100 to 250 miles to start. Current commercial battery technology (roughly 150 to 220 Wh/kg at the pack level today, with the leading edge approaching 250 Wh/kg) limits electric aircraft to regional routes today. This covers commuter flights, island-hopping, and short intercity routes that currently burn jet fuel in small turboprops. The Manhattan Projects battery program will push the energy-density frontier hard, and if it succeeds beyond current expectations the scope of this industry will extend to medium- and longer-haul routes. But the mission will not wait for breakthroughs. It will deploy what works today.

Build a domestic industry from scratch. No U.S. company has yet reached commercial-scale annual production of a type-certificated electric aircraft. Beta Technologies has opened a Vermont facility designed for up to 300 aircraft per year and is producing ALIA CX300s ahead of expected FAA type certification; a handful of other domestic manufacturers are in the prototype and pre-production stage. The RFC will finance factory construction and take equity stakes in the most promising domestic manufacturers. This is the public venture capital function: kick-starting an industry where private capital alone has not been able to deliver production-volume manufacturing.

FAA certification. The FAA's electric aircraft certification process is underway through case-by-case special conditions issued under existing certification authority, but no comprehensive final rule for electric aircraft is in place. The MFA will direct the FAA to establish an expedited certification pathway for electric aircraft, modeled on the streamlined processes used for military and experimental aviation.

Airport charging infrastructure. Electric aircraft need high-power charging fast enough to turn a regional plane around in the same window as a refueling stop. The RFC will finance charging installations at every major hub, starting with the top U.S. hubs in the first years of the Mission and extending to every commercial airport served by the certified electric fleet by the end of the decade. The Clean Power Mission's distribution-grid buildout provides the feeder capacity. Building the charging infrastructure in lockstep with the aircraft factories removes the last logistical barrier to scaling the electric fleet.

Slot access at major hubs. At capacity-constrained airports, the RFC-financed electric aircraft fleet and other new entrants will receive guaranteed slot access, giving the domestic electric aircraft industry a clear path to market rather than being locked out by incumbents.

Advanced Market Commitments. An Advanced Market Commitment from the federal government guaranteeing it will buy electric aircraft for all federal regional travel will anchor demand and de-risk the first production runs, the same mechanism the government used to stand up vaccines, semiconductors, and other strategic industries.

Fewer short-haul flights in the first place. The Mission for Public Transport will invest heavily in conventional and high-speed rail, intercity bus service, and regional transit connections. Many of the short-haul routes that electric aircraft would serve are better replaced by trains and buses altogether.

What this delivers: Certified electric aircraft serving regional routes within five years. A domestic electric aircraft manufacturing industry that did not exist before. Airport charging infrastructure at every major U.S. hub. Industrial capacity and workforce skills that transfer to the long-haul moonshot as it matures, whatever the winning technology. Federal procurement anchoring the first production runs. Slot access at major hubs that lets the industry reach scale.

Solution 3: Use Sustainable Aviation Fuel as a Bridge to a Clean Future

The long-term goal is zero-emission long-haul flight. Until that day comes, sustainable aviation fuel is the bridge. SAF is clean liquid fuel that works in existing jet engines. It will start cutting emissions from long-haul flights immediately, using the planes the country already has, while the long-haul zero-emission fleet matures. Every SAF pathway hits a hard supply ceiling: biomass on one side, captured CO₂ on the other. SAF cannot fully cover aviation demand on its own. That is exactly why the long-haul moonshot must run in parallel.

Don't pick one winner. SAF is a category, not a single technology, and each pathway has different costs, timelines, and feedstock constraints:

• Waste-based biofuels (municipal waste, agricultural residues, used cooking oil) are the cheapest and most available today. The U.S. has more waste and residue feedstock than Europe.
• Cellulosic biofuels (forestry residues, energy crops) can scale further but need first-of-a-kind production facilities. Cellulosic feedstock is also the route to bio-aromatics, the synthesized aromatic molecules that pure 100 percent SAF needs in place of the fossil aromatics blended into today's jet fuel. Bio-aromatics production is a dedicated RFC investment line and a Manhattan Projects research target.
• E-SAF (synthetic fuel made from green hydrogen and captured CO₂) is the only pathway not bottlenecked by biomass feedstock, but the most expensive and energy-intensive of the three.

The RFC will finance facilities across all three pathways, maintaining a diversified portfolio rather than gambling on a single technology.

SAF is a bridge, not the destination. None of these pathways is zero-emission, and none can carry aviation on its own. Even the cleanest, the waste-fat and waste-oil HEFA fuels, cut emissions only about 60 to 80 percent over fossil jet fuel, and weaker feedstocks deliver far less. The biomass routes hit hard supply ceilings long before they can meet global demand, and e-SAF, the one pathway not bottlenecked by biomass, needs captured CO₂ and consumes green hydrogen that could fly aircraft directly with far fewer conversion losses. SAF plants are ordinary industrial assets with multi-decade lifetimes, so over-committing now locks in decades of fossil-like flying and diverts capital from the zero-emission transition. The Mission will treat SAF as exactly what it is: a bridge, built fast, run hard during the transition, and wound down as the new aircraft come online.

Pay airlines to make the switch. Rather than mandate SAF use, the Mission will subsidize it. The RFC will finance airlines that retrofit their fleets to handle higher SAF blends and commit to larger offtake volumes, with the most generous packages reserved for first movers. A revived and expanded federal SAF production tax credit — fully refundable and paid through direct pay so producers of every size can claim it, available for a defined ten-year window, and phasing down on a set schedule as the zero-emission fleet matures and the SAF bridge winds down — will close the price gap between SAF and fossil jet fuel at the pump. Federal departments and the military will be early SAF customers, anchoring demand for the first wave of refinery output. Aside from the temporary IRA-era 40B blender credit and the new technology-neutral 45Z clean fuel credit, the U.S. has no durable aviation-specific federal fuel program. The main volume-driving programs — the California LCFS and federal RFS — were not designed for SAF, which can only opt in as a side benefit. The Mission will create the first durable aviation-specific federal support, built entirely on carrots rather than mandates.

RFC investment in SAF production. SAF facilities are capital-intensive, first-of-a-kind plants, exactly the risk profile the RFC is designed for. The RFC will finance cellulosic biofuel refineries, waste-to-fuel facilities, and e-SAF plants. Green hydrogen infrastructure feeding e-SAF production connects directly to the Hydrogen chapter's electrolyzer buildout.

What this delivers: Immediate emissions reductions from the existing long-haul fleet without waiting for new aircraft. A domestic SAF industry that reduces dependence on imported fossil jet fuel. Lower aromatic content in the fuel supply, which also cuts the persistent contrails that are themselves a meaningful non-CO₂ warming forcing. A bridge that buys time for the long-haul zero-emission fleet to mature.

Presidential Leadership

Zero-emission flight, and hydrogen power above all, is something most of the public has barely heard of — so the president's first task is to introduce it, explain it, and make the country want it. The case is plain: the country that invented the airplane has fallen behind, and the companies that should be building the future have quit on it. China flies hydrogen demonstrators and publishes a staged roadmap to mainline aircraft, Japan, the EU, and the UK have each committed hundreds of millions to hydrogen aviation, and the United States has no comparable program, while Airbus has delayed its hydrogen airliner and Boeing has bowed out. The president will name what we will build instead: not a contract handed to the incumbents who walked away, but a network of new public corporations, chartered by the RFC and racing each other to deliver the world's first zero-emission long-haul aircraft, alongside American-built electric planes on every short-haul route within five years.

During the Campaign

The candidate makes the case in person. The candidate will run on rebuilding American aerospace around the next era of flight: three public corporations racing to build a zero-emission long-haul aircraft, a full-scale prototype rolled out and in ground testing before the first term ends, and certified American-built electric aircraft flying paying passengers within five years. The candidate will introduce hydrogen aviation to the public directly — what it is, why it matters, and why the country that built the jet age cannot afford to buy the next one from China. The candidate will travel through the aerospace manufacturing regions, the airport and airline-hub communities, and the engineering and trades towns a revived industry would feed, pledging a generational job pipeline of aerospace engineers, factory workers, electrolyzer operators, cryogenic technicians, and airport ground crews.

The campaign stunt. The candidate will fly on a hydrogen-powered aircraft and will pair the spectacle with a named first commitment: the lead U.S. hub city and the leadership of the first public corporation announced on the spot, with capital and a timeline.

Tell the truth about the odds. The candidate will say plainly that hydrogen flight might not work, and will explain why we are going to try anyway, and why running three teams at once and investing in batteries and rail in parallel is how a serious country hedges a bet it intends to win. Naming the risk out loud is not weakness; it is the difference between a moonshot and a sales pitch, and the public can tell.

Name who quit and who blocks. The candidate will name who profits from the country flying dirty and standing still: the legacy carriers guarding their slots against new electric entrants, the fossil jet-fuel suppliers whose market the transition ends, and the blue-chip aerospace giants that abandoned hydrogen and would rather coast on existing designs than build the next aircraft. The frame is not that these companies are the enemy; it is that the public will not wait on companies that have given up, so the public will build the industry itself. The president will confront the members of Congress who carry water for the incumbents directly, from the bully pulpit.

Long-lead groundwork. Volunteer aerospace engineers and program veterans will go to work during the campaign, because chartering the public corporations and designing the first aircraft takes years of preparation. They will draft the charters for the three corporations, short-list the first hub cities against the hard constraints of clean electricity, water, transmission, and load, open informal talks with NASA, the national labs, the most promising electric-aircraft and hydrogen startups, and the candidates to lead each public corporation, and map the iterative freight-first development plan and its annual benchmarks.

The Transition

Executive — name the people. The president-elect will name the RFC aviation mission-team lead, the chief executives who will run the three public corporations, the Secretaries of Defense and Transportation, and the NASA Administrator and FAA Administrator who will drive the build. Everyone leading the Mission will be chosen for real, hands-on experience in aerospace, engineering, and operations, not a Washington résumé.

White House and Departmental — settle the structure and the sites. The incoming team will finalize the design of the three-corporation system: the shared RFC charter, the open-research-and-IP rules that bind all three, the COTS-style milestone payment schedule that pays each corporation only on hitting its published benchmarks, and the military's first-customer role for hydrogen freight aircraft. The team will identify the first wave of hub cities for hydrogen production and airport buildout (clean electricity and water first), the refinery sites for SAF production, and the manufacturing regions for the regional electric fleet; the Department of Defense will begin formal site selection for the first military hydrogen aircraft hosts. The team will negotiate memoranda of understanding with governors of aerospace and clean-energy states to align permitting, workforce training, and infrastructure dollars with the federal push.

RFC — lock the deals. With the RFC, the team will lock the capitalization and charters of the three public corporations, the equity-by-default terms and factory financing for the most promising domestic electric-aircraft manufacturers, the airline retrofit-financing structure, and the anchor procurement commitments — the federal regional fleet for electric aircraft, federal and military offtake for hydrogen freight and SAF.

Draft the legislation. Counsel will draft the full package for the opening window: the charters authorizing the three public aviation corporations, the revived SAF tax credit, the statutory framework for airline retrofit financing, the FAA expedited-certification authorization, and the funding line that carries the long-haul program beyond what existing authority and procurement can reach.

Day One

The first orders will convene DOD, NASA, DOE, and the RFC and direct them to launch the iterative hydrogen-aircraft program under existing authority within 90 days, beginning with the unmanned freight-drone benchmark and the military first-customer contracts, while the corporate charters move through Congress. Another will set GSA to pre-purchasing federal regional-travel fleet orders from RFC-financed electric-aircraft manufacturers on a five-year transition timeline. A further order will instruct the FAA to open and publish draft rulemaking on the expedited electric-aircraft certification pathway within 90 days, with the final-rule clock running from enactment of the certification statute. Another will direct NASA to reprogram its aeronautics budget toward the Mission's research priorities and submit an expanded request, and a last one will require every commercial airport receiving federal funds to include hydrogen-handling and high-power-charging infrastructure in its next master plan update.

The First 100 Days

As the package the transition team produced arrives in Congress, the president will work the votes member by member, making the calls and the case in person rather than delegating it to aides. The package will charter and capitalize the three public aviation corporations — the load-bearing act that only Congress can perform, since no public corporation can be created by executive order; will revive and expand the federal SAF tax credit; will enact the statutory framework for RFC airline retrofit financing; will authorize the FAA's expedited certification pathway for electric aircraft, starting the final-rule clock; and will appropriate the funding line that carries the long-haul program through its first benchmarks.

Operational: Years 1–10

Each annual benchmark the three corporations hit, each electric aircraft that enters service, and each airport hub that breaks ground will draw the president's public push, the persuasion case for hydrogen made again as the public meets the technology for the first time, and the honest restatement of the odds as the program clears each hurdle. The president will confront the legacy carriers, fossil fuel suppliers, or members of Congress when they move to stall the build, and where a member stands in the way, the president will take the fight into that member's own district at the next election. The RFC aviation team will run the financing, the charters, and the anchor procurement; the White House will keep NASA, DOE, FAA, and DOD aligned around the program and hold the three corporations to their shared benchmarks and open-research rules; and DOD will serve as the military first customer that de-risks the technology. The long-haul passenger aircraft runs past year 10, a beyond-2040 program by design, and the president will keep the public behind it the whole way.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

Foundations Laid by Year 1 (2030)

• Three public aviation corporations chartered, capitalized, and racing; shared-research and open-IP rules in force; COTS-style milestone payment schedule and annual benchmarks published
• First unmanned hydrogen freight-drone development underway, with military first-customer contracts awarded
• Parallel Manhattan Projects battery energy-density track underway
• Federal SAF tax credit revived and expanded; RFC airline retrofit financing program operational
• First RFC-financed SAF production facilities breaking ground (waste-based, cellulosic)
• Expedited FAA certification pathway for electric aircraft in effect, first manufacturer applications filed
• RFC equity investments in 2-3 domestic electric aircraft manufacturers committed
• First hub cities selected on clean-electricity-and-water criteria; airport hydrogen production and infrastructure studies underway
• Airport electric aircraft charging infrastructure planning underway at top hubs, first installations beginning

First Flights by Year 5 (2034)

• Unmanned hydrogen freight drones flying real cargo routes; first piloted hydrogen freight demonstrators in testing
• Each of the three corporations hitting published annual benchmarks; flying-wing and unibody airframe designs in flight test
• SAF blending at meaningful percentages, domestic production scaling
• New commercial aircraft delivered by Airbus and Boeing, certified for 100 percent SAF; retrofits underway for the existing fleet
• First e-SAF plants operational, fed by green hydrogen from the Hydrogen Mission
• First bio-aromatics pilot plants online, supplying the aromatic molecules that pure 100 percent SAF requires
• First electric aircraft types receiving FAA certification and entering regional commercial service
• Domestic electric aircraft manufacturing facility operational
• Airport hydrogen handling and refueling infrastructure under construction at major hubs, with on-site production in the clean-electricity-and-water host cities
• Airport electric charging operational at the first hubs served by certified electric aircraft

Industry Established by Year 10 (2039)

• The three public corporations flying full-scale zero-emission long-haul prototypes; ground and in-flight testing complete (primary path: hydrogen)
• Hydrogen freight aircraft in regular commercial and military service
• First new-generation clean-built airports under construction, with long runways, on-site hydrogen production, and high-speed rail links to city centers
• Majority of domestic jet fuel blended with SAF; the fleet is 100 percent SAF capable, with bio-aromatics and e-SAF supplying the high-blend share
• Domestic SAF industry producing at scale across multiple pathways
• Domestic electric aircraft industry self-sustaining
• Airport hydrogen handling and refueling operational at the lead U.S. hub airports
• Electric aircraft charging operational at every major U.S. hub airport
• Electric aircraft serving short-haul regional routes across the country, including communities that lost service
• United States ahead of Europe and Asia in long-haul zero-emission aviation engineering, factory capacity, and airport readiness

The Moonshot Lands beyond Year 10 (2040-2045)

• First commercial zero-emission long-haul passenger flights (primary path: hydrogen), the public corporations' aircraft entering airline service
• Airport hydrogen network and the new clean-built airports expanding to secondary hubs
• Green hydrogen at or approaching $2/kg, making the hydrogen path economically viable
• Zero-emission long-haul aviation becomes a commercial reality, with the patents and the upside held by the public that built it