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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."
Forget about the ozone - I want more CO2. I mean the plants really love that stuff and I like my plants to be healtthy.
Bobo Mahoney
What about the lead thats in General Aviation Fuel? Are they doing anything to reduce that?
is getting insane. With China the new carbon dioxide emissions leader we need to focus on finding actual new sources of energy. You know, so China will have some economic incentive to stop polluting so much, not that it would hurt for the USA to cut its emissions drastically as well.
We need to face facts: Assuming the global climate is as fragile as all of the chicken littles claim, the US and Europe ceasing all greenhouse emissions right now would do nothing to save us from our gradual slide into superhurricane seasons and worldwide desert conditions, simply because India and China are still developing and couldn't give two shits about all of our initiatives if any cost them money.
I'm still waiting on a testable model (no, not a replica of the globe, trolls) before I jump on this "global warming is both horrible and human-mediated" that so many people seem to have blindly latched onto, drawing absurd conclusions after equating correlation with causation and screaming as shrilly as the most terrifying of harpies when someone expresses so much as a single iota of skepticism at their grand new movement.
My point is this: Cutting our planes' emissions will do nothing but place further financial strains on us, leading to a relative inability to compete with other countries less concerned about the illusory monster of global warming. In addition to this, it will do nothing to make a marked decrease in our own production of carbon dioxide and other gases.
This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down.
Come to think of it, what would happen to planes when our fossil fuels start to run out? I wonder what kind of altenative energy source could be used to run those "big" machines.
It seems somewhat counterintuitive that airlines would ignore such an obvious way to save fuel if there weren't tradeoffs involved, considering its one of their single greatest expenditures.
I've got family of my own in the industry, and I've never heard of any easy fixes for fuel consumption, but I do know airlines have implemented fuel-saving procedures such as taxiing with only one engine on. Given the meager fuel savings that provides but their strong advocacy of it, it just doesn't stand to reason that they would ignore other such easy ways to conserve.
Do you have any data, studies, reports, anything to back up your claims besides some appeals to authority?
You're kiding right? People would, and do, bend over.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
Additionally, the FAA announced that their agency would be renamed the 'American Institute for Regulation of Pilot Licensing and Aeronautical Navigation and Engineering' (AIRPLANE) to satisfy new federal requirements for cutesy acronyms.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
It's great that they're looking at ways to increase efficiency of current aircraft, but the question remains: how can we keep increasing our use of air travel without putting out more greenhouse gases. You hear people talking about restrictions on air travel in the future, and I can't understand why we can't find technological solutions.
For example, is anybody doing research on biofuels for turbines? I've heard of the USAF looking into it for greater energy security, but is it a reasonable proposal?
Could we eventually have a prop-powered commercial plane, even one that was electrically powered? Check out the Tu-95 Bear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95 as an example; it's a much more blue sky proposal, but within the realm of possibility.
I assure you, all planes are fully loaded when they take off.. it's called the frieght industry.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There has been literally decades of research, and research is ongoing. There's no single good answer. High compression piston aircraft engines may be able to run on fuels with other additives, but all the reformulations discovered so far are much more toxic than the current 100LL formulation.
Some of the technical solutions include shipping 100LL without the lead (which mid-compression engines can probably run OK), electronic ignition systems, and diesel (jet fuel) retrofit with new engines. Whole new, small aircraft, particularly from Diamond Aircraft, run on Jet-A. The lead additive (TEL) is getting more expensive, so price is encouraging some movement in this direction anyway, particularly outside the U.S.
It's important to keep some perspective here, though. The amount of lead released into the atmosphere by piston aircraft engines is incredibly miniscule, and it's not released in the ways automobiles did (i.e. near the ground, in lung-concentrated ways). There are about 5,000 public airports in the U.S., and the vast majority of those have very limited numbers of aircraft operating on the ground for very brief periods of time. So unless you live on a taxiway at a busy small aircraft airport, and breathe deeply for some years, you're OK.
There are many, many places where environmental protection money would be more wisely spent. The simple act of burning coal, for example, is incredibly, vastly more dangerous than anything the entire piston aircraft engine fleet could do. That said, it would probably make sense for the government to give the engine industry (mainly Lycoming and Continental) a bit of a nudge, telling them to find any solution they wish to stop producing new aircraft engines that run only on leaded fuels by a date certain (say, 10 years out). In all probability they can recertify with a combination of electronic ignition and the same 100LL formulation but without TEL, and they can do that relatively inexpensively. If the feds made every aircraft owner who replaced their engines eligible for fuel tax rebates for a period of, say, 5 years from date of installation, that'd probably get the job done to get the fleet converted. But nobody is in a rush to do this because nobody at the EPA sees a public health problem here.
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.
I loath flying in the commuter planes; slow, noisy, cramped.
Unfortunately for you, (and me) most flyers care more about schedule convenience, and perceive all aircraft as the same noisy, cramped environment.
I would think that larger planes would also improve efficiency.
Sure, I'd prefer to stuff medium to high density routes with nothing but 767s, 787s and 777s flying 1-2x a day instead of the 5-6 flights each day between say, SJC and DFW. But it ain't gonna happen. It's easier to sell a ticket on a 50-seat Canadair to someone who wants to leave in mid-afternoon than to convince them to wait several hours to take a more efficient, larger jet. And the efficiencies of scale aren't all that bad for small jets, either.
(Even when I did try to shoehorn my schedule around so I could fly United's 777 service instead of yet another aging 737 or claustrophobic 757, United screwed up and I got to watch the 777 push back as the jet I was in taxied to the gate over an hour late. I ended up on the smelly, cramped 737 I was trying to avoid.)
Most people don't fly high density routes because the hub-and-spoke system puts lots of people on lots of planes going to a handful of airports. It's easier to service the system with lots of small to medium sized airplanes.
This still isn't the issue that should be discussed. Most greenhouse gas emissions (that can be prevented to continue our society running in a way similiar to how its running how) come from poor building design. Architecture, engineering and software design is what needs to be looked at, not car's which contribute only about 1/3rd the damage that building, living in and operating buildings add to the factor.
We need to use smart and effective 'green' design. And no, I don't mean we should be living in squalor cabins with grass on our roofs--beautiful, effective and low cost green architecture is available...if the industry will ever be embraced!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Stop speculating.m l
The waste per passenger, but most of all the method and place (high in the sky) of combustion ensure that greenhouse effects of aviation fuel are far worse than those of motorcars' combustion engines.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.ht
If you're planning to travel, want to do it the way that's most environmentally friendly and the consideration whether to drive instead of fly is a realistic option (e.g. both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross), then drive.
Call me crazy, but I think we could reduce air pollution a lot by banning coal-fueled aircraft engines and use horses instead. It just might work.
According to all of my AvTech professors, if you open up a Turbine engine you'll find a really exhausted horse inside a giant hamster wheel. It's the Piston engines we need to worry about. They run on weasels, which of course produce green house gases.
Galileo never commented on the Bible. He stuck entirely to what he personally observed and knew about.
And because it contradicted the Bible he got in trouble.
This is the exact opposite of Dyson, who is so arrogant that he assumes that he can completely master something as large as climate modelling and then reject it, without in fact knowing much about it at all.
He's the guy that invented the Dyson sphere and has a good record of being right about physics. His comment is not based on him mastering anything. He knows the limitations of the models the climatologists are using. Just like Galileo he gets flack from pointing out the flaws in people's beliefs because those beliefs are based on faith, not on reason.
Even if you don't agree with the comparison, is shouldn't be that hard to figure out.
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;
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
Great post. If you want to hide your head in the sand, that is. Let me just shatter the myth that you're perpetuating in your first paragraph.
1. The US is by far the biggest polluter per capita.
Compare apples with apples, instead of of apples with oranges, by looking at per capita figures. The CIA World Factbook lists the population of China as 1,321,851,888 (July 2007 est.) and the population of the US as 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.).
You wouldn't compare the carbon dioxide emissions output of the US with that of a tiny nation like Bermuda, so play fair and use the most sensible measure to compare who's contributing how much.
A quick mental calculation will show you that, in carbon dioxide terms alone, the US produces four times as much domestically as China does.
2. China makes goods for the US, not the other way around.
All those goods that China makes that the US consumes (clothing, electronics, etc) have an associated cost in terms of carbon dioxide and other pollution. But, of course, the figures that you've latched onto don't attribute those to the country of consumption, only to the country of origin.
Put simply, when a Chinese factory makes something that an American will buy, it's at least partially (if not fully) pollution caused by the American consumer. So, a large chunk of the pollution caused by China, etc is due to the US (and other consumer nations) as well.
The US has five percent of the world's population. The US consumes roughly 25-30 percent of the world's goods, and hence is responsible for 25-30 percent of the pollution. To sustain everybody on the planet at the current US level of consumption would take five to six Earth's worth of resources and create a similar amount of pollution.
Now do you see why the US plays such a big part in this and should be taking positive, proactive steps to try to address the issues instead of trying to shift the blame to others?
As for your closing complaint that "This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down", well, I could not disagree more. The free market alone will never make the necessary steps to do what's necessary by itself, no matter what you might think. Want an example? Then just look at how car manufacturers fought tooth and nail against mandatory installation of seatbelts in cars. Same shit, different decade, that's all.
Please take your head out of the sand for a minute to think about it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
because China effectively has two populations, those in the present and all those 'out there'
A large number of China's population will not become modernized within our lifetimes... but they apparently sure do well to keep the averages down when painting China's bad behaviour
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There already are air corridors. Why not train airline pilots in joining, leaving and flying in "wild geese" - "V" shaped formations on common path segments to save fuel? Of course, provided passenger airplanes could fly in formations at all... AFAIK they avoid flying in trail of another airliner because of turbulences. Then, why military planes can fly in formations, what is essential difference? Wing span?
Possibly wake turbulence. Much like a boat, an airplane leaves a "wake" in the air behind it. For smaller planes, it's not that big an issue (when doing a steep turn in a Cessna 150 I often hit my own wake. Just rocks the plane for a little "jolt" but otherwise no big deal - but thats the wake of a 20' long plane weighing around 1300lbs). As planes get larger/heavier though, their wake becomes more and more intense.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I assure you. you are wrong.
there are many planes that take off half full every day
There is a flight every hour Ottawa-Toronto it is usually less then half full.
I took a flight from Seatle to SF that was less then half full.
Calgary to SF was about 3/4.
--meh--