Cleared for takeoff: Aura Aero pioneers the future of electric air travel on AWS

As global air travel reaches new heights, the aviation industry must balance increased demand with a need to become more sustainable. Recent data from IATA reveals that we’re flying further, more frequently than ever before, with an all-time high of 5.2 billion passengers projected to fly in the next twelve months. At the same time, regulatory pressure to reduce emissions is also on the rise. The use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is increasing, with production doubling from 2024-2025 to a projected 1.9 million tonnes. However, IATA estimates airlines will need 500 million tonnes to reach net zero by 2050.

Aura Aero is advancing more sustainable aviation by developing hybrid-electric and electric aircraft. The company leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to operate a scalable cloud infrastructure defined as code using Terraform, with containerized workloads orchestrated via Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This cloud foundation supports a multi-stage data platform, leveraging services such as Amazon Neptune and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), providing global scalability as the company expands. It also enables the execution of complex high-performance computing (HPC) simulations to model aerodynamics and aircraft systems.

On the runway to net zero

Aura Aero was founded in 2018 by three engineers—Jérémy Caussade, Wilfried Dufaud, and Fabien Raison—driven by a shared ambition to create more sustainable air travel. Today, the company has established itself as a pioneer in decarbonized aviation with a presence in France, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. Unlike other operators in the space, the Aura Aero team doesn’t just develop proof-of-concepts for showcasing the potential of sustainable technologies; they operationalize them. “We are a complete company,” says Marc Germain, Chief Digital Officer. “We’re a design office, but also a manufacturer. We don’t sell dreams, we build aircraft.”

Aura Aero first built INTEGRAL, a two-seat training plane. “First, we designed INTEGRAL using a conventional combustion-powered engine. We certified it, we made it fly, and we sold it to customers,” says David Roche, Deputy Chief Digital Officer. “We then transformed that design into a fully electric model.” The team is also currently working on ERA, a 19-seat hybrid-electric regional aircraft which enables up to an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.

These innovative designs contribute to industry emission targets of a 55 percent reduction by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. To that end, Aura Aero is the first aerospace company awarded by the EU Innovation Fund, receiving €95 million in funding. “It's a strategy of small but pragmatic steps towards sustainability,” says Germain.

Finding the right co-pilot

The Aura Aero team is not only forward-facing in their aircraft design, but also in how they manufacture and operate as a business. “Our main markets are in the United States and Europe,” says Germain. We plan to sell worldwide and are already considering building our next factories in France and the US, after recently obtaining the construction permit for our Aura Factory in Toulouse.” A key part of the company’s ability to plan ahead and actively pursue future initiatives, investments, and expansion is the fact that Aura Aero is cloud native, with its entire digital infrastructure built on AWS.

“From the beginning, we were convinced that a new company needs to embrace the digital way of working, especially in manufacturing,” says Germain. “We do not have any on-premises hardware. Everything we’ve built is in the cloud.” Since its founding, Aura Aero has worked closely with AWS. “For us, AWS is not a supplier, it’s a partner,” says Germain. “We are not just buying some services or resources; we are collaborating with them.” That collaboration goes beyond technology.

For example, Aura Aero took part in AWS Activate, a dedicated program that supports startups with technical expertise and funding in the form of AWS Credits. The team used those credits to help them rapidly build their first AWS Landing Zone. Thanks to its ground-breaking work in electric aviation, the company was also selected to take part in the Compute for Climate Fellowship, a global R&D funding program founded in 2023 by AWS and the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI).

Every year, a select group of companies is accepted into the program and empowered to turn bold ideas into climate solutions that deliver real results. “It’s been very useful for us to take advantage of the support the fellowship provides,” says Germain. “We’re investing the funding it has provided into running simulations for our upcoming ERA model aircraft.” Those simulations form a crucial part of Aura Aero’s aircraft design and development, helping the team analyze aerodynamics and model performance in different contexts.

Innovating in the cloud, and above them

“AWS provides the HPC we need to run aeronautical simulations,” says Germain. “These simulations can take multiple days, even a week to complete and require massive core and memory capacity. Sometimes we need 100 cores, other times we may need 1,000 or 2,000.” There are three steps in the process: preparing the simulation, running it, and then processing the results. “For each step we need different kinds of computers and software,” says Germain.

The Aura Aero team uses AWS infrastructure to dynamically allocate computing resources for each stage of the simulation process using services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). “We can prepare a new simulation on EC2 with a lot of CPU cores and RAM,” says Germain. “We then send that computation to HPC to start the campaign. Once complete, we use another type of instance to process the results.” Roche adds: “AWS makes it all very easy because all the resources you need are available on-demand.”

Engineering insights with structured data

Aura Aero has also built a multi-stage data platform on AWS designed to organize the large volumes of engineering and operational data generated throughout the aircraft development lifecycle. “Within Aura Aero we have a very strong data strategy, and we have developed and are continuing to develop our own data platform,” says Germain. That platform is structured across three layers that transform raw data into usable business insights.

In the first stage, data is collected from multiple software systems across the company. Much of this information arrives as unstructured or semi-structured data, such as JSON files retrieved through APIs, and is stored in Amazon S3. This layer acts as the foundation of Aura Aero’s data architecture, storing raw data from across the organization. Germain explains: “In case of issues with an aircraft, we need to prove to authorities that we can get back to the original data from 20, even 30 years ago.”

In the second stage, raw data is cleaned and structured using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) running PostgreSQL. This process transforms fragmented system outputs into standardized datasets that can be analyzed and used across the organization. The final stage introduces a semantic data layer powered by Amazon Neptune. Here, Aura Aero models the relationships between data objects originating from different systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.

The result is a unified view of key business objects like parts, suppliers, and engineering components. “Amazon Neptune is very convenient because we have the ability to create links and to attribute relationships between the different objects,” explains Germain. By linking these datasets together, the platform makes complex engineering information easier for teams and software systems to understand, query, and analyze.

Ready for the next ascent

Going forward, Aura Aero will continue to shape a more sustainable future for the aviation industry. “ERA is our next big step,” says Germain. “We are currently building modern facilities that will feature a lot of Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.”.

Aura Aero will continue to collaborate with AWS as it expands. “AWS was our first choice because of the breadth of services it provides,” says Germain. “It allows us to scale very quickly and support our customers around the world. When we opened our facilities in Daytona Beach, we had an operational AWS landing zone in America in a few minutes. We simply ran our Terraform script and the landing zone was ready.”

The data platform Aura Aero has built on AWS also creates a strong foundation for AI implementation, an area the company has been exploring for the last two years. “AI is better when you are using more structured data, and when you learn to prompt correctly, you really start to see the benefits,” Roche explains. “Our developers are around 15 percent more efficient and the quality of our code and documentation has improved by 30–40 percent.” The company is now considering how Amazon Bedrock can be leveraged to extend its use of AI.

Ambitious startups like Aura Aero are finding success on AWS. Programs like AWS Activate have helped over 350,000 disruptors get up and running, attract investor interest, and turn their ideas into marketable products with direct funding in the form of AWS Credits. If you want to build boldly, scale without limits, and launch with confidence, apply today.