Slashdot Mirror
Plane Simple Truth
brothke writes "In the TV show House, M.D., a premise that protagonist Dr. Greg House holds dear is that people are liars and stupid. Real life is often not far from House's observation. At the general public level, people are
often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad
charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything. A piece I wrote on that issue, New York
News Radio — The voice of bad science, details that.
While it is too broad to call the authors of Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends liars; their mediocre research created the scenario that far too many took their research as
reality. Known as the Peeters report, after lead author P.M. Peeters, the authors of Plane Simple Truth refute the wide-spread belief that the fuel efficiency gains in the commercial aviation sector are erroneous, which is the
principle theme of the Peeters report." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Plane Simple Truth
author
Geoffrey Thomas
pages
208
publisher
Aerospace Technical Publications
rating
9
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-0975234167
summary
Valuable book in the important debate over greenhouse gases and aviations contribution to it
The aviation industry is often an
environmental pariah, with environmentalists crying foul at the industry. But it is only a pariah due to flawed
data that negatively influences the public debate, and this book attempts to set the record straight. Plane Simple Truth is an articulate and extremely well-written and researched
rebuttal to the Peeters report, and other flawed studies.
The Peeters report flies in the face of reality, in which gains in jet engine efficiency over the last 40 years have been astounding. Contrast those gains with the popular Cadillac Escalade and similar SUV's whose mileage per gallon is often measured in single digits, and whose efficiencies have gone in the opposite direction.
The authors wrote Plane Simple Truth as they felt that never in recent history has an industry been so maligned and the public so misled by so much falsehood and distortion. With the Peeters report and climate activists pointing the accusing finger at the aviation industry, Plane Simple Truth is their defense.
The reality is that while the Detroit automakers were making huge gas guzzling SUV's well into 2008, companies such as Lockheed had fuel efficiency on their mind back to the 1970's. In fact, fuel efficiency has been a key factor in the aviation industry since the early days. This is based on simple economics and physics in that every pound of fuel, is a pound of payload that the airline cannot carry, which costs the airline money as fuel economy is a major driver in the industry. The bottom line is that fuel economy is absolutely critical in commercial aviation. Witness the number of aviation bankruptcies in 2008 when fuel prices soured.
Like a first-rate defense attorney, the book defends the industry against its charges. In every chapter, the authors show the errors, both intentional and those errors of omission, where incorrect reporting and research have negatively affected public opinion.
While not a book about the history of jet engines; the book details the fascinating and phenomenal improvement into the efficiency of the technology. But the underlying theme of the book is that of the environmental issues.
The book details the fundamental errors in the Peters and other environmental reports that have been often taken as the unquestionable truth. Rather than analyzing the facts like the book authors have done, the media often creates sensationalist headlines with an emphasis on short sound bites, often at the cost of scientific fact. Not only do the authors refute the Peeters report, they show in detail how important aviation is to the global economy. In fact, the aviation industry is critical to every growing economy.
The books 18 chapters cover the entire spectrum of jet emissions and their incredible development in detail. Current topics such as bio fuels and their promise, new engine technology, aerodynamic gains, green airlines and more are discussed. The book makes ample use of charts and photographs to illustrate its points.
Plane Simple Truth is a fascinating book that exposes the myriad errors of the flawed environmental studies. It is also a fascinating look at the development and history of jet engines, and the amazing progress that has come about in the last few decades. Huge strides have been made that increase power by significant amounts, while simultaneously cutting emissions. In fact, there are less environmental issues to worry about in the future due to aviation, given the significant strides that are being made.
The book makes many of its valuable points via the approach of letting charts and diagrams do the talking of often dry statistical facts. Be it fuel efficiency, less emissions, or toxic gases, the book shows that misplaced myths and the smoke and mirror games that are often used by those with an agenda, have negatively affected the public's view of aviation.
We have seen that a single bad piece of research is enough to derail an entire industry and mislead the press and politicians. Plane Simple Truthis an important book that has relevance to everyone, as there is no one that is not positively affected by the aviation industry.
While the industry still has a long way to go in other areas such as passenger satisfactions, lost luggage, air traffic control delays and much more, the engine makers have continually pushed the envelope in terms of fuel efficiency and environmental concerns, and they have done this for well over half a century. This was long before the environment was a cool topic. It was also done when jet fuel was still quite cheap.
While the book's authors are intimately involved in the airline industry and clearly pro-airline, and the book's publisher is Aerospace Technical Publications; the authors let the facts speak for themselves. While greenhouse gases and their potential negative effects are part of the public and scientific debate, the ability of modern jet-engines to minimize those effects is clear. Plane Simple Truth is a valuable book in the important debate over greenhouse gases and aviation's contribution to it.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Plane Simple Truth from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The Peeters report flies in the face of reality, in which gains in jet engine efficiency over the last 40 years have been astounding. Contrast those gains with the popular Cadillac Escalade and similar SUV's whose mileage per gallon is often measured in single digits, and whose efficiencies have gone in the opposite direction.
The authors wrote Plane Simple Truth as they felt that never in recent history has an industry been so maligned and the public so misled by so much falsehood and distortion. With the Peeters report and climate activists pointing the accusing finger at the aviation industry, Plane Simple Truth is their defense.
The reality is that while the Detroit automakers were making huge gas guzzling SUV's well into 2008, companies such as Lockheed had fuel efficiency on their mind back to the 1970's. In fact, fuel efficiency has been a key factor in the aviation industry since the early days. This is based on simple economics and physics in that every pound of fuel, is a pound of payload that the airline cannot carry, which costs the airline money as fuel economy is a major driver in the industry. The bottom line is that fuel economy is absolutely critical in commercial aviation. Witness the number of aviation bankruptcies in 2008 when fuel prices soured.
Like a first-rate defense attorney, the book defends the industry against its charges. In every chapter, the authors show the errors, both intentional and those errors of omission, where incorrect reporting and research have negatively affected public opinion.
While not a book about the history of jet engines; the book details the fascinating and phenomenal improvement into the efficiency of the technology. But the underlying theme of the book is that of the environmental issues.
The book details the fundamental errors in the Peters and other environmental reports that have been often taken as the unquestionable truth. Rather than analyzing the facts like the book authors have done, the media often creates sensationalist headlines with an emphasis on short sound bites, often at the cost of scientific fact. Not only do the authors refute the Peeters report, they show in detail how important aviation is to the global economy. In fact, the aviation industry is critical to every growing economy.
The books 18 chapters cover the entire spectrum of jet emissions and their incredible development in detail. Current topics such as bio fuels and their promise, new engine technology, aerodynamic gains, green airlines and more are discussed. The book makes ample use of charts and photographs to illustrate its points.
Plane Simple Truth is a fascinating book that exposes the myriad errors of the flawed environmental studies. It is also a fascinating look at the development and history of jet engines, and the amazing progress that has come about in the last few decades. Huge strides have been made that increase power by significant amounts, while simultaneously cutting emissions. In fact, there are less environmental issues to worry about in the future due to aviation, given the significant strides that are being made.
The book makes many of its valuable points via the approach of letting charts and diagrams do the talking of often dry statistical facts. Be it fuel efficiency, less emissions, or toxic gases, the book shows that misplaced myths and the smoke and mirror games that are often used by those with an agenda, have negatively affected the public's view of aviation.
We have seen that a single bad piece of research is enough to derail an entire industry and mislead the press and politicians. Plane Simple Truthis an important book that has relevance to everyone, as there is no one that is not positively affected by the aviation industry.
While the industry still has a long way to go in other areas such as passenger satisfactions, lost luggage, air traffic control delays and much more, the engine makers have continually pushed the envelope in terms of fuel efficiency and environmental concerns, and they have done this for well over half a century. This was long before the environment was a cool topic. It was also done when jet fuel was still quite cheap.
While the book's authors are intimately involved in the airline industry and clearly pro-airline, and the book's publisher is Aerospace Technical Publications; the authors let the facts speak for themselves. While greenhouse gases and their potential negative effects are part of the public and scientific debate, the ability of modern jet-engines to minimize those effects is clear. Plane Simple Truth is a valuable book in the important debate over greenhouse gases and aviation's contribution to it.
Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.
You can purchase Plane Simple Truth from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Fuel is heavy. Every pound of fuel you burn is one less you can carry and charge for.
Of course it kind of goes south when you talk about people that take an airliner designed for 300 people and use it as a private jet.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm always fascinated by how IT people frequently consider themselves experts on everything under the sun. Whoever this Rothke is, he's no aeronautical engineer, and as far as I can tell his snide remarks at the beginning of the review are based on his reading of an admittedly pro-aviation industry book.
You are correct about the airlines and incorrect about the SUV market. But that's okay.
Airlines want higher efficiency because like any GOOD corporation that wants to make A LOT of money they are meticulous in accounting.
I NOW own a BIG TRUCK and a tiny car. Why? I wasn't good at accounting. I studied my finances over a six month period and saw what I was paying in gas and found that I could have a BRAND NEW car - and save about $80 a month.
People who have giant SUVs are welcome to have them but they either know exactly how much they cost and are okay with it.
I can tell you that the whole "Green" movement is creating liars everywhere. There are 'green' checklists that can be completed without being 'green'. Green is the new 'low fat'. It has lost its meaning.
D~y
What I want to know is how much fuel does it take to travel from San Francisco to New York City by the following methods:
A modern plane
A Prius
A generic 6 cylinder sedan
An Escalade
Amtrak
Of course, the extra 4 days on the road really make me favor the plane, but I want to know how guilty I should feel.
> Amusingly, House says that we all lie, but he is the only exception.
He says everybody lies, and he doesn't exempt himself. He lies like crazy, to get his way. He'd say he'd be stupid not to, since it does help him get what he thinks is right.
He just thinks that lying to your DOCTOR is stupid, since that gets you dead, which is usually not what you want.
Wow, psychologists must be forbidden to ever take a statistics class then. Remember, these people are usually just as fucked up as the people who pay them $$$ to listen and now we're trusting them to do math.
Uh? I'm in a statistics class right now, and I can assure you that in a normal distribution the median is the same as the mean. The plot of the probability distribution function of a normal distribution is a bell curve. It's symmetric, so the mean is in the middle (which is the median). I think you might be the one who needs to crack a book.
I think he means that its silly to think the distribution could be even remotely normal... Looking at the tails of the curve, you're always going to have more people at the low end whom are randomly physically screwed up (due to accidents or whatever) and a smaller tail at the high end of superior intellects.
Consider that the superior intellects require good genetics AND not getting screwed up from environment or accident vs the lower end requires either bad genetics OR getting screwed up from environment or accident. And certainly the distribution of getting screwed up from environment or accident is not a normal distribution. And random mutation and un-natural selection will not give normal distribution either.
There's just no way the high and low tails can belong to a normal distribution. Sure, maybe if you squint and look kind of blurry around the center, the range of 99 to 101 might be kind of a symmetric normal distribution...
It's just the "soft sciences" being politically correct while using math terms they don't understand.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And you're basing that on your own personal experience of three whole cars? I'm sold.
You think I've only owned three cars in the last forty years, let alone only driven three cars in the last forty years? And I haven't even driven one of the new hybrids!
Do you have any idea how bad the gas mileage was on my friend's 1968 GTO? Or my 1968 Mustang?
Free Martian Whores!
It's not always as hard as you make it out to be, either. Small changes in shape that don't really even impact style or cost can make a huge difference. For example, SUVs are made with body-on-frame construction, not unibody. This makes it easier to churn out a couple new models every year, but makes them heavier and less safe. For another example, the Hummer H2 and Scion xB are both boxy vehicles, but the Hummer has a drag coefficient of 0.57 while the Scion has a drag coefficient of 0.35 (and I'm talking about drag *coefficient*, not drag area; this is *before* you consider changes to the cross-sectional area). It's almost a willful disregard for efficiency. And we haven't even gotten into things that have a price point but pay off rather quickly, such as more efficient drivetrains (higher efficiency engine layout, IMA or other stop/start, diesel, HCCI, etc), aluminum in places where steel isn't needed for structural integrity, higher efficiency accessories, and so on, or more radical streamlining.
That said, consumers probably are mostly to blame, namely for insisting that their vehicles look like a brick and drive like armored tanks, complete with the high weight, low visibility and lack of maneuverability that entails. But automakers are not blameless.
Anyways, my primary hope is that the fuel crunch (which seems to be going away fast, IMHO) will help change consumer style preferences to more aerodynamic shapes and lighter bodies, as well as increasing the awareness that a higher upfront cost can pay off down the road.
That was either the start of something bad or the end of something stupid.
The funny part is that this summary of the book does a piss poor job of debunking the paper.
In fact, I read the paper and it makes a lot of sense. It makes no claims about turbines decreasing in efficiency, merely that turbines are less efficient than piston engines... which is absolutely true.
However, they're more reliable, require less maintinance and are easier to fit to airplane designs.
What exactly in this paper requires debunking?
I think the OP is a shill for someone, or just totally taken by some BS he ran into somewhere in a book. :-)
You know, there's a reason why the US military uses turboprops on most of its transport aircraft. Because THOSE are more efficient AND more reliable than ducted turbojets used on passenger aircraft.
But they have a slightly slower top speed, so they aren't used for passengers.
Anyway, the whole analogy to the authors of this paper being "stupid, gullible idiots" is a bit ridiculous as it's a pretty rational paper that outlines facts based on documented evidence and draws a sensible conclusion.
Anyone should be free to disagree with it (including the OP), but calling them idiots is not helping that cause, but rather, making HIM look like an idiot.
Aircraft piston engines are more efficient than aircraft turbine engines in units of KW-hours mechanical vs. fuel consumption.
The efficiency of an airplane in energy required per mile doesn't depend strongly on the airspeed IF the airplane is designed for that speed / altitude. (lift to drag ratios don't change a lot at the best speed for each design).
But - piston engines are heavier per output power than turboprops, and in practice for most designs the overall efficiency (passenger miles / gallon of fuel) is better for turbine powered aircraft (it isn't carrying the extra weight of the piston engines)
For small private aircraft, piston engines are more efficient for most designs - but operate at lower speeds.
At the moment turbine engines are not efficient at the low powers (~100-200kW) required for small aircraft, but are used for almost all large aircraft.
The comparison of jets and turboprops depends on the mission flown. At low altitude, low speeds, turboprops do better. Turboprops are most often used for short haul runs.
Recommend the 2 volume set "The Internal Combustion Engine in Theory and Practice", Taylor, as an excellent reference on this.
Joe Frisch
AMEL-I
How many cars are on the road today? I mean unique models, not cars renamed and packaged a little differently for different companies? If 40 cars isn't a decent sample size, there are a lot more than I'm aware of at this time. That's certainly possible, but I'd say there aren't likely to be more than 1000 total car models (actually on the road and making any sort of impact in engine design) so 40 doesn't really seem like such a small number. It may or may not be statistically large enough, but I'd wager it is.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
If you cannot even get the number of valves right, how can you be so sure about your gas mileage figures?
OK, that's not fair. I don't agree with mcgrew, but it's perfectly possible to know one and not the other. I have no idea what engine's in my wife's Sienna minivan, but I can tell you that we got 25.8 miles per gallon on the last road trip, averaged over 2,200 miles.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
For a start, they seem to hinge their conclusions on per-seat-kilometer values, and then seem surprised at the outcome - per-seat-kilometer values miss significant aspects of the subject at hand:
If you read the report, they realise this and therefore repeat the analysis on a per-ton basis rather than a per-passenger basis. Similar conclusions.
1. Cargo - planes carry significant amounts of cargo today, on the piston engined aircraft of yesteryear it was pretty much 'passengers OR cargo, but not at the same time'. Thus the plane today is doing work that your plane of yesterday would be excluded from because you aren't getting a per-seat-kilometer value for it (no seats).
Again, this should be covered by analysing on a per-ton basis.
2. 3. 4. 5.
These are all practical concerns. Valid if you're running an airline but fairly irrelevant if you're trying to calculate the environmental impact of flying.
Anyway the review, if perhaps not the book, fails to mention the real question which has little to do with energy efficiency or whether or not manufacturers are trying their darndest to make aircraft more efficient. An 8000 mile flight at 60mpg still burns a lot of fuel. If you flew that distance at 120mpg you would still burn a lot of fuel, equivalent to several months of regular motoring. If air-travel increases exponentially over the next few years as predicted, there will ultimately be a large increase in emissions even if fuel-efficiency doubles, which it patently will not do in the near future.
Oh, and yes, I'm related to the aviation industry :)
Nice of you to say so. I have no links - aviation, or environmental.
Sorry, but I had a 76 chevy Vega. They were crap. I loved it, but it was a piece of crap.
If you want to look at gas mileage over time, I suggest looking at the Honda Accord, which by happenstance came out in 76 in the U.S., although I could only quickly google up the '78 stats.
http://www.mpgomatic.com/2007/10/16/honda-accord-gas-mileage-1978-2007/
For those not wanting to follow the link:
Gas mileage in 1976: 24 City, 30 Highway
Gas mileage in 2008: 21 City, 30 Highway