Originally Posted by
TURIN
I didn't know about the Chinese coal seem. 😡
Thanks for the 'like'!!
Before I retired I was a physicist, concerning myself with all forms of energy, not just nuclear. I do like to get my facts right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire tells you all about coal seam fires, but frustratingly doesn't give facts and figures about the costs of putting out the fires, just that it's 'very expensive'. Compared with what? A brand new Airbus A350? A 100g pot of caviar? Most people would consider both of these to be 'very expensive'. But compared with, say, the cost of a war they're small change.
It annoys me a bit that people bash the aviation industry over the head all the time - now it's about CO2 emissions (actually planes create more global warming from NOx than CO2) before that it was 'chemtrails' (entirely pseudoscientific), there's always something that people who dislike anything modern can create a fuss about. What is unavoidable is noise pollution, and using electric propulsion on short-haul flights, such as UK domestic flights, would mitigate a lot of that, though propellors will always make a whistling noise. The problems about electric propulsion are mostly economic rather than engineering, already there are prototypes which would do LHR-EDI, but the cost of the batteries and the time on the ground recharging between flights make them uneconomic at the moment; the weight also limits the number of pax and luggage that could be carried for a given MTOW.