Remember the fanfare that greeted Virgin Atlantic boss Sir Richard Branson's biofuel initiative last year? Well, it now seems that Virgin's quest, with Boeing and GE Aviation, to find the holy grail of alternative fuels has produced the required miracle - which may just help heal jet flight's carbon stigmata.
You may also remember Branson's concept of a "starting grid" using tow tugs to reduce engine run-time. Although its operational merits were obvious, Branson's bright idea of 2006 seems to have fallen quietly by the wayside.
Talk to Boeing's finest environmental engineers and they'll admit that although carriers could theoretically use a 50% biofuel blend as soon as it is available, without modification of aircraft, distribution or storage, this in no way means that even in 10 years' time will there be the processing capacity and capability to supply anything like that much biofuel. Promising too much too early, only to fail to deliver, serves no one.
While nobody underestimates industry's need to reduce its environmental impact, much of the ongoing derring-do merely whips up public frenzy with hype only to be confronted by engineering reality. Perhaps industry's principal task is to avoid spin at all costs and start communicating something of the complexity of these engineering challenges, steeped as they typically are in impenetrable industrial apocrypha.
Source: Flight International
