Old hands on this blog will recall our interest in clean aviation (LSS 28 11 2022; 24 11 21) We like aviation, especially the civil kind, for its role in making the world smaller and bringing peoples and cultures closer. So it’s nice to see another group of brave entrepreneurs and engineers making a serious attempt not just at the technology, but thinking about the logistics of how it might be implemented
Based at Kemble in Gloucestershire UK pioneers ZeroAvia are staking their all on Hydrogen Electric technology. [1] It’s clean, it’s green, and as you might expect, their website waxes lyrical about all the advantages. Two points catch our eye. Firstly, they are trying to set up a carefully designed refuelling system so the hydrogen is generated by renewable energy right next to the plane as it sits on the runway. Secondly, they seem to be building up slowly, testing the technology first on small planes on short hop feeder flights, then slowly extending to short haul and medium haul with bigger power systems. No one is claiming to take over the Atlantic until about 2040, which to us seems eminently reasonable, yet sanguine.
And the moral of the story? Where you put enough intelligent people together, and give them enough working capital, there is hope that some of your problems might be solved. See our occasional blogs on medical science if you don’t believe us. But when you divide yourselves into warring tribes and fight viciously over dwindling resources (aided by entities like Fox News, for example) you will have no hope at all. Choose.
We saw this story on Channel 4 News in the UK, who are about as diametrically opposite to Fox News as one may wish for
[1]https://zeroavia.com/
#ZeroAvia #aviation #green fuel #transport #climate change
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