ATTITUDE FOR ALTITUDE: GUY LEITCH
One of the unexpected pleasures is having a fondly cherished idea booted into touch. For me one such notion was that hydrogen powered planes are not practical. Hydrogen has always just seemed like a bad idea – think of the Hindenburg disaster – and for a hundred other reasons. ONE OF THE BIG DRIVERS for hydrogen planes has been to reduce carbon emissions. But the aviation industry is not a big polluter – it contributes less than 3% of carbon emissions worldwide. Yet it has always been a huge target, from those who, like Chicken Little, think condensation trails mean the sky is falling. And also for the ‘flight shaming’ movement – which tries to make everyone who buys an airline ticket feel guilty.
airlines offset their emissions using negative carbon emissions technology. One such is biofuels and Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) but these are currently a publicity stunt as the growing and conversion of crops to liquid fuels is carbon-intensive. And besides – the world needs farmers to produce food – not JetA. Electric planes are still even more farfetched – especially for any airline wanting to fly sectors longer than 30 minutes. And for less than 30-minutes, people should take trains and busses if they are that worried about the environment.
there is just no substitute for fossil fuels
Responding to the pressure of populism, the airline industry is super sensitive to flight shaming and has created huge and costly programmes such as CORSIA – the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. But the real problem is that there is just no substitute for good old fossil fuels – especially for the allimportant gravimetric efficiency, which is the amount of energy in fuel compared to its weight. Fossil fuel’s energy-density advantage is all but impossible to beat, so CORSIA aims to have
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June 2021
And then the other day I got invited to a webinar organised by the Aeronautical Society of South Africa (AeSSA) on hydrogen powered flight. The presenter was the splendidly named Professor Pericles Pilides from Cranfield University. Turns out both Airbus and Boeing are seriously looking at hydrogen power. Airbus says it will decide by 2025 whether there is a market for
