The world’s first commercial flight on biofuel was made from Filton, England, and landed at Toulouse, France just a couple of days back. At least that is what the makers of the A380 claim. One might say at the very outset that that is not entirely true. The fuel used for the flight was a 60-40 mixture of conventional aviation fuel and liquid-to-gas fuel made from fossil fuels. Then
how can we call it a flight made on the power of biofuel?
Well, we can cut the people some slack as this is the first step towards that wonderful eventuality when most commercial airlines and aviation jets will fly with zero emissions. The aviation industry has taken quite a stick with the way they have failed to progress along the lines of growing environmental concerns. They have been a perennial target of the environmentalists who claim that every aspect of aviation is wrong- from the airports to the exhaust. But the interesting thing here is none of these people come forward with a solution.
Sebastien Remy, head of Airbus’ alternative fuel program and a man constantly looking for solutions, said the fuel used Friday was no cleaner in carbon dioxide emissions than regular fuel, but it had local air quality benefits because it produced no sulfur. According to the designers of the historic flight the double-decker A380 needed no modification to use the gas-to-liquid, or GTL, fuel, which was designed to be mixed with regular jet fuel so the airplane “does not know the difference”.
This is the first step in trying to incorporate biofuel in to commercial liners. It is nice to see that it started with the biggest of them all- the A380. The research in this industry is looking at eventually using Algae as the source of fuel for the entire aviation industry. That would indeed be great, but it is still a very distant dream.
