Considerations and Findings During the Conduct of the CONCERTO CS-23 HVD Gap Analysis

The CONCERTO project intends to enable innovation, while maintaining the safety performance of current configurations, by drafting suggestions for new means of compliance within the scope of the three Clean Aviation branches. This paper is drafted within the high-voltage distribution branch of the CONCERTO consortium. It provides an overview of existing considerations about the certifiability of (hybrid-)electric aircraft configurations and presents a structured and methodical approach that has been established while conducting CS-23 regulatory gap analysis for the CS-25-derived CS-23 CONCERTO HVD architecture. A limiting factor when incorporating existing insights into a new regulatory gap analysis is that most studies are based on a specific configuration, limiting their applicability. One key feature of the presented methodical approach is the property-based similarity approach that overcomes this limitation by enabling systematic incorporation of existing project-specific findings into the analysis to be conducted, taking into account the specific properties of different system design and sizing. The structured comparison, based on relevant technological properties, enhances the applicability of the identified critical areas and regulatory gaps of available gap analyses by enabling a systematic transfer of gap findings to other HVD system designs, even with different properties.