Flights to get longer to save the planet?

[BonnieLass]

A study by University of Cambridge has been released with various ways to make aviation in general more sustainable......some of the ideas might not be welcome though

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/flight-path-to-net-zero

Full study report : https://report.aiazero.org/

[PAXboy]

A welcome step. When we look at how slowly governments have responded to the informationm about climate change? I have watched the inertia for over 30 years. I do not know how we can get individual govts to change policies - leave alone the the individual.

I hope that something can happen.

[justapax]

To put the problem in perspective, from https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector aviation accounts for 1.9% of global CO2 emissions, and about half that is military aviation. (Total greenhouse gas emissions by industry tend to closely follow CO2 emissions, and are harder to measure, which is why CO2 figures are commonly used.) While cleaning up NOx emissions is a key aim of designing ever cleaner and more efficient jets, let's look at other sources: 'Fugitive emissions from energy production' at 5.8% includes coal seams which are on fire mainly in China and the US, and which no-one bothers to put out because it would cost money; also, in the US there is wrangling over whether that money should come from the Federal government or the state governments, so there is no political will to reducing this source of pollution. The cost of putting these fires out would run into a few millions - far less than the cost of a single Rolls-Royce Trent XWB powering an Airbus A350: a hundred times that has been spent on reducing civil and general aviation emissions. Little effort has been put into reducing military aviation emissions.

[DaveReidUK]

Rather than "flights to get longer", which could be misinterpreted as meaning they would be adopting longer routings, a better thread title would be "flights to TAKE longer", which would imply (correctly) that flying slower is being considered.

[TURIN]

Justapax. 👏👏👏👏👏

Finally, I've been banging this drum for years and you are the first to give it some real context.
I didn't know about the Chinese coal seem. 😡

[justapax]

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.