Boeing has announced a 3 prong plan for attacking the size of the carbon footprint of commercial planes. The three areas in which work is being done to reduce the carbon footprint is in the weight of the airplanes and their fuel efficiency, improvements in air-traffic management and testing sustainable biofuels with the goal of finding renewable fuels for aviation that don’t compete with crops for food.
Together, all of these initiatives represent the way forward for the aviation industry and it is believed that putting these improvements in place won’t increase costs noticeably.
Those within the industry have said that each of the carbon footprint reduction plan points are achievable within the industry but it would need government support to make it happen.
Airlines have demanded increased efficiency from airplane and engine manufacturers and manufacturers have responded. Over the past 50 years of flying the carbon emissions per mile flown have dropped by 70%. With further technological work, that figure can continue to rise.
Precision information, commonly shared, safely enables such fuel-saving and emissions-reducing operational changes as continuous, low-power descents, more direct routing, closer spacing, and curved approaches to landing.
As for the biofuels trialed, test flights have been conducted using mixtures of standard jet fuel and several different sustainable biofuels, among them fuels made from algae and camelina. One of the features that have been demonstrated with these fuels is that they have a lower freezing point than petroleum and that they can also have a higher energy content per gallon.
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