Carbon footprint GA aircraft

[Sam Rutherford]

Is there an online calculator anywhere for this?

[Maoraigh1]

Is "Carbon Footprint" related to "Fuel Economy"? It'll vary with type of use.
Real world GA carbon footprint must be much smaller than car footprint in the UK as a result of the manufacturing footprint being written-off over a much longer lifetime.

[soay]

My car and aircraft are both 13 years old, so generalising about lifetimes is not very productive. There's a lot more material in a car than in the average spamcan, which further complicates any comparison of manufacturing footprint.

You don't really need anything special to calculate the carbon footprint of a fuel burner. A litre of 100LL weighs about 0.72 kg, of which about 87% is carbon. When burned, it combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide which has an atomic weight of 44, made up of 12 from carbon and 32 from oxygen. Putting that all together, each litre of fuel emits 0.72 * 0.87 * 44 / 12 = 2.3 kg of CO2.

Hence, if your aircraft is burning 8 USG/hour (about 30 litres/hour), it is emitting 30 * 2.3 = 69 kg/hour of CO2.

[Proteus9]

Aircraft tend to have a much greater service life which will reduce carbon footprint over time compared to the quite common automotive change every few years. There is also far more repair, maintenance and overhaul done which is close to non existant in modern vehicles.

In terms of when flying it's fuel burn and a little bit of oil. Although would you perhaps want to look at ouput per distance unit to make it more comparable, as you are generally going significantly faster than the average car speed.

[Sam Rutherford]

That's great, thank you!

[Pilot DAR]

From a more practical point of view, a GA aircraft probably gets you somewhere more directly than a car. If I fly my 150 from home to Toronto, it'll take 35 minutes. If I drive to the same airport from home, I'll push 2 hours, including sitting in traffic. My diesel VW (once they fixed the emissions! :uhoh:) burns less fuel per distance than the 150, but I could be driving a less economical car, with mileage hardly better than the 150, in which case, the trip would be less carbon footprint by flying it than driving it. Sitting in traffic must be the worst for carbon footprint - and I don't do that in my plane!

[jez d]

There is a statistic recorded in Hansard (UK parliamentary records) suggesting that the total amount of AVGAS burned in the UK each year equates to around 15-mins of London rush-hour traffic.