Greenpeace Proposal: A Return to Airline Glory Days (But not for you)
September 22nd, 2009
|
| Share |
Put on your best suit and cuff-links and make sure the butler remembered to pack everything you’ll need in the top grain leather luggage. Be sure you remember what fork to use, because you’ll be rubbing elbows with the upper crust of society and would not want to look foolish in front of an Astor or Vanderbilt. Now double check that flight time and make sure you’ve got your toothbrush. The Rolls Royce awaits to take you off to the airport.
That may be the future of airline flight, an enjoyable and exclusive travel for the fantastically wealthy. However, chances are this won’t apply to you. If you’re in the other 99.9% of the population, the closest you’ll likely get to an airplane is seeing one flying over your home. It’ll be exciting, none the less, because aircraft won’t exactly be a common sight, and each time you see a passenger plane you can marvel at it, wondering what world famous and fabulously rich people it carries. Perhaps it will inspire you to fantasize about someday striking it big and taking one of those planes to a dinner with the Prince of Morocco or a round of polo in Corsica.
At least that is how it might be if Greenpeace has their way.
Greenpeace and other groups have been increasing their focus on the airline sector when it comes to CO2 emissions. Sure, there are still hundreds of coal plants, underground coal fires, cement kilns, gas flares, natural gas leaks, inefficient oil refineries, heavy-oil burning ships, trucks, cars and other producers, but it seems that the aviation sector, which produces less than 1.5% of world CO2 emissions and considerably less of world greenhouse gas emissions (weighted by gas lifespan and effect), has become the big scapegoat. (Some groups put it at as much as 5% – HIGHLY SUSPECT). They also like to claim that airlines will emit a much higher percent of world CO2 by 2050 – which is fine by me, if the increased percentage comes from other sources reducing their portion.
Via “Building Sustainable Design”:
This means other sectors of the economy may have to increase their overall emission reduction target from 80%, as stipulated in the Climate Change Act, to 90% in order to compensate for the aviation industry.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the UK has the toughest climate change regime for aviation of any country in the world, and that the government would make aviation emissions central to a global deal on climate change at the Copenhagen conference later this year.
She said: “The issue isn’t about the growth of the sector, flying less or building fewer runways, it’s about capping our emissions and the government is already leading the way on this.”
Greenpeace said carbon emissions from the British economy “will have to be squeezed till the pips squeak” in order to accommodate the “binge-flying culture” it claims is promoted by government.
The lobby group said the credibility of building a third runway at London Heathrow airport was called into question.
A Greenpeace spokeswoman said: “Even without the proposed expansion of aviation, the UK industry is going to find it very hard to offset its emissions through trading carbon.
“Other industries such as the power sector will have to reduce their emissions even further to create room for the aviation sector to grow even more.
“Electricity consumers could end up footing the bill,” she claimed.
Electricity consumers could end up footing the bill? So apparently this is to say that it’s more difficult to convert electricity generation to lower emissions than to convert airplanes to lower emissions. The fact of the matter is that nothing short of government-imposed caps or extreme taxation is going to cause a dramatic reduction in the CO2 emitted by aircraft. There’s simply not that much room left to improve their efficiency. Fuel is already the single largest operating expense for airlines and because of this, there’s no need to force them to use the latest and greatest technology for efficiency. Airlines already use the best high bypass turbines available and are adopting the latest in highly efficient aircraft as fast as the aerospace industry can provide it. Yet as flying becomes cheaper and the world becomes more connected, more people are taking to the skies.
There’s really only one way that airline CO2 emissions can be cut: reverse the trend by reducing the amount of flying. This could be done by capping emissions or capping the number of flights, but either way the result is the same: less planes carrying less people and more people who can’t go where they want to on an aircraft. Anyone who has taken economics 101 should know what this will lead to: when a commodity is in short supply, it becomes expensive. The market compensates for the lack of space on aircraft by simply pricing out many of the consumers.
If you don’t believe it, here’s the smoking gun from the Guardian:
Cost of air travel ‘must rise to deter people from flying’
The cost of air travel must rise to an extent that it deters people from flying and to compensate developing countries for the damage it does to the environment, according to the government’s advisory body on climate change.
Ticket prices should rise to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions from aviation fall back to 2005 levels and to raise tens of billions of pounds in flight taxes to help developing nations adapt to climate change, for example, by building new flood defences, the committee on climate change says.
An agreement to cap aviation emissions must be reached at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen if countries are to meet targets to combat global warming, the committee said in a letter to ministers. Rich countries should take the lead, ensuring their aviation emissions were no higher or lower than they were in 2005 by 2050.
It says airlines should be forced to share the burden of meeting that emissions cut, the Times reports.
In advance of the December meeting in Denmark, the committee says any deal to reduce emissions from flying should be “ambitious”, and the aim should be for no less than the EU’s current plan, which require a 5% reduction in emissions from 2013 to 2020.
The committee could challenge the government’s decision to approve a third runway at Heathrow airport in order to reduce C02 emissions sufficiently to meet that target, according to the paper.
While the cost per passenger of compensating developing countries for climate change would initially be small, it would eventually rise to a level that would deter people from flying.
To say that it would “deter people from flying” is not entirely accurate. As we know, the “sting” of a fixed cost does not bother some people as much as others. You could triple the price of tickets and it’s unlikely that Bill Gates would flinch (not that he flies on airlines anyway), but the college student who wants to experience foreign cultures or the family that wants to visit their relatives on the other side of the world is going to remain grounded.
Quite a change in world culture and connectivity indeed, given that the relatively small amount of CO2.
But lets not forget something here, the airlines have, in the past, operated under a much different business model from the current one – a business model tailored to cater to an exclusive crowd with a limited number of seats. The modern airline system came with the birth of the first modern airliner, the Boeing 707. It took over in the 1970’s when deregulation made competition stiff. The system we are currently used to encourages airlines to lower prices and gain as many passengers as they can, each competing for travelers.
An alternate approach was once the norm. Rather than going for low prices and high quantity, airlines competed for the patronage of those for whom the cost was hardly an object. The big flying boats of the 1920’s and 1930’s could have carried hundreds, but they didn’t. Rather, since the airlines were catering to the extremely wealthy, luxury was expected and a single passenger could generate quite a bit of profit, if they were pampered enough. The market was small but highly lucrative. Each passenger could have their own small cabin. Later, the age of the Stratocruiser and the DC-3 began to make airline travel affordable to those who were only rich, as opposed to super-rich. Still, with such a small market and exclusive clientele, long duration flights always featured sleeping berths and meals served on find china.
Today most of the ultra rich fly on private aircraft, thus eliminating the market for ultra first class. Some international airlines still offer lavishly appointed first class service, but this is only a small portion of the airline buisiness. That may change, however, if some have it their way. As aircraft are restricted and more and more expensive, packing more passengers in eventually begins to hit a point of diminishing returns and the older approach of courting the rich and famous becomes the better operating strategy. Once the business shifts from the general population to the nitche market of the elite, the market dynamics change and the airline system as we know it ceases to exist for most of the population.
But before we consider returning to the days of the Pan Am Clipper and the five star service of the flying boats, lets consider what this will do in terms of CO2 reduction. Here’s a chart for the UK, since that seems to be where the debate is centered. It shows the aprocimate Co2 emissions, but does not account for other gasses like methane or nitrous oxides.
Numbers are approximate and represent current time period (roughly 2005-2009)
Sources: Scottish Government South Cambridge District Council Department for Transportation Climate Choices UK
To demand that human kind can or should reduce net CO2 production to zero is ridiculous. We will never be able to completely outlaw fire and depending on how you define “carbon neutrality,” the very act of breathing could be considered intolerable. It is also entirely unnecessary that we reduce carbon dioxide production to zero. The planet is perfectly capable of handling some production of CO2 and plenty of natural processes produce CO2 and always have. Cutting back the majority of manmade carbon dioxide is an obtainable and rational goals.
Since no viable alternative to hydrocarbon fuels exist for aviation and due to both its net impact and the benefits it produces, it is a very poor place to look for room for reduction. Any reduction will likely come at enormous price and will be trivial compared to other sources. There are much much lower hanging fruit which also have the benefit of reducing other pollutants.
Sorry if I sound greedy, but I really enjoy seeing other cultures, traveling to visit distant friends, visiting the homeland of my ancestors, appreciating unique parts of the world and otherwise traveling by air. Until every coal fired plant in the world has been shut down, I don’t want to hear about how we need to make airline travel super expensive. It’s just not worth it!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, History, Misc, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Airlines operate in a very particular type of market. In general one can say that almost all travel by air is discretionary so when the economy tanks they are the first to feel it and the last to recover. The other thing that falls from this fact that air travel is somewhat of a luxury, is that every government in the world see airlines as a tax cow, this does nother for the airlines popularity with the public.
Greenpeace has found the ideal target a weak, unpopular industry, that they can kick when they are down.
Quote Comment
September 22nd, 2009 at 11:59 pm
DV82XL said:
You’re thinking of modern airlines – the kind that have been around for the past few decades. I submit that what Greenpeace and the likes of them really want is to eliminate airlines as we know them and make it a market which is not so much about general mass transportation as it is catering to the super rich.
Think of Imperial Airlines, the Pan Am Clipper Service and the German Zeppelin Service. Totally different than today’s airlines. They did not have a huge number of flights and the costs of flying were enormous. These airlines had no problem enduring the Great Depression. Contrary to the popular belief of the rich stock brokers jumping out their windows, the Great Depression, like most recessions, really hit the middle class and created a huge class divide, but most of the super rich were not that effected and actually, due to the increased class divide and the depression of companies they could gain more power and get richer in the end.
Hence, although Model-T sales may have declined in the Great Depression, Rolls Royces did not. Even today, you see that despite the economic slump, sales of things like Aston Martins are doing just fine.
I really think there is an innate desire in the Green mentality to return to this. Not just in airlines, but rather in society in general. The whole concept of making things more expensive to force conservation is bunk in the sense that it will force it across the board, but it can be part of returning to a society where there is a distinct nobility and a massive lower class.
DV82XL said:
It may be somewhat of a luxury to the passengers, but it’s not to many others, especially in tourism-dependent areas. Also, air travel is one of those industries that has a very far reaching and dramatic footprint on the economy. Everyone from air port services to hotels to rental car agencies to the factories that make tires for aircraft and the tour guides at various attractions is effected.
The thing that is so sickening to me is that by declaring it a luxury and trying to make it expensive, you don’t deny the luxury to the wealthy, you just end up increasing the class divide by pricing out an entire segment.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:46 am
Air travel is quite efficient for the number of miles per gallon of fuel per passenger. Somewhere near 100 MPG if my memory serves me correctly.
I am not going to stop doing business with distant markets just because flying is too expensive. I will probably resort to driving to my meetings and thus use even more fuel than flying.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 am
Quite honestly I don’t think that the industry can go back to the days of the Pan Am Clippers. To start off with the current infrastructure is designed around a high traffic system to support it. Modern aircraft are just too damned expensive to make and operate profitably on an all First Class service. God knows it has been tried: at least six times that I know of directly – in all cases they failed miserably and in a very short time.
The fact is that there is a minimum level of traffic below which domestic and transborder service will no longer be profitable and the service will disappear, and the only routes that will be served are long haul overseas ones. Rail and buses will take up the slack. The airlines are well aware of this and have been for years.
This may come anyway as fuel costs go up, even if the economy recovers. The days of large volume short and medium haul air travel might be numbered, Greenpeace rhetoric or not. And yes the whole travel industry may have to downsize. I am not particularly happy ether as I was looking forward to doing some extended trips now that I am retired.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:45 am
This will have an even bigger impact on air cargo.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:04 am
DV82XL said:
It’s not an issue of sending the airlines back in time. It’s an issue of sending the entirety of Western industrial society back in time. Airlines are just one small part – pricing everyone out and making it very exclusive, but that’s not the big picture. Having the great engineering and technology of the world reserved for the elite few was the norm. They would like a return to not just the grand flying boats for the few, but to the opulent ocean liners built by cheap labor or the pyramids built on the backs of common workers for the pharo.
Air travel is for the tiny upper class, the ruling minority. The same goes for food. They get consistent secure food supplies even-though the “organic” system means the lower classes starve during a bad harvest year.
Notice that Greenpeace officials have no problem flying to all kinds of events. Hell, they even have a private gas-guzzling helicopter.
The concept of uber-luxury aircraft for the very few may not work in this society, but if you can return to a more feudal system, money no longer is an object for the elite class.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:01 am
DV82XL said:
It may have failed miserably when operating in the airline capacity, but the super-luxury market does very well in the charter buisiness. If you are rich you can fly where you want on a very well appointed Gulfstream. If you are super rich you can fly on a tricked out 757 complete with bedroom and plasma TV’s. This has done fairly well and is the preferred way of traveling when you have no problem dropping a few grand per head or potentially more.
I think that the thing that would best get the goals of Greenpeace leaders and that whole mentality well put together would be to crush the airlines or outlaw airline travel outright. They clearly believe nobody should fly except for themselves and their organization has plenty of money to rent – or hell, even own – a jet plane to take them where they want when they want.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:51 am
Q said:
Well Q, I have been in the aviation sector most of my life, and I can tell you these small jet air taxi/charters come and go with depressing frequency, and if you ever looked closely at one of the custom big jets you might be very surprised to see how badly they have been taken care of.
Twice I have been part of initial inspections on these types of bird. The first was Elvis Presley’s and the second, years later, was the Playboy jet, and wouldn’t have left the ground in ether of them. The company I was working for was asked to do some light repairs on the airframes of these ships, and both times refused because the requested work did not go far enough for us to want to have our name attached to them. Both aircraft needed H-checks (full o’haul) and all the owners wanted was a C1-check.
This is not unusual for this class of airplane, keeping the equipment at the same level that airlines do is very expensive. What private operators do is generally scrap the unit off, remove the interior fittings, and find another low-time airframe. This works because there is a fair turnover in equipment from the commercial side. How this applies here is that in the absence of big airlines turning over airplanes, the cost of a big private would be staggering.
In other words all is not what it seems in the private jet world.
But even if Greenpee gets its way and the number of flights is reduced and the cost per passenger mile is increased, it doesn’t necessarily mean that ticket prices need go up. One of the big problems with the air transport system is that passengers demand frequency. From the passengers point of view they want to pick any two points on the map and have service between them with departures every twenty minutes. The airlines however can provide less expensive carriage with bigger gage, flying less often. If there is a crackdown on flying for whatever reason, I am certain that prices will be kept reasonable by using bigger and bigger birds. This would not be such a bad thing in my opinion, mostly because it would also help take some of the load off the infrastructure which is straining at the seams right now.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 am
DV82XL said:
Yeah, I can imagine. No amount of fumigation could ever get the playboy jet to smell right again, I’d imagine.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 am
drbuzz0 said:
How did elitist Greens such as these manage to usurp the political left so utterly?
Is the problem that the Left tore itself apart between the working class (who wanted a higher material standard of living, possibly but not necessarily at the expense of the rich) and the chattering classes (who wanted to create a “caring” image of themselves, while not truly caring about anyone’s standard of living but their own?) The unions — historical mainstay of working-class politics — were shattered by globalization, leaving the chattering classes in firm command of the West.
By the way, although biofuels cannot supply sufficient fuel for our ground transportation needs, could they provide sufficient fuel for aviation needs, if synthetic hydrocarbon fuels turned out to be a bust? In this scenario, ground transport would be electric, while ships would be powered by on-board nuclear reactors…
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:32 am
Sheesh. Nonsense from top to bottom. First, as the good doctor points out, elimination of underground coal fires would do far more. Second, conversion to a nuclear based economy would do far more. Third, there is still considerable question about the whole carbon dioxide=climate change theory, both the absolute truth of the matter and the extent.
This is clearly more an emotional reaction to wealth than a real policy matter. We could forget the whole issue if the loonie left didn’t have so much power to create havoc.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:28 am
They could probably save an equal amount of CO2 if all of the Greenpiece people would just stop breathing. They can just make it a policy among their members to only inhale, never exhale. Problem solved. (in more ways than one)
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
mike said:
I don’t think this is true; maybe DV82XL can provide some facts. I remember seeing a chart of passenger-miles per gallon (or maybe per Btu) in Scientific American many years ago, and as I remember it the jet was at the bottom. I could certainly be wrong. Any of you-all have the facts?
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
George Carty said:
Sorry, I meant “in firm command of the Western Left”…
Oh and as far as my “why did the Left turn against progress theory”, was the old Leninist contempt for the masses also a time bomb lurking within left-wing politics as a whole?
Chuck said:
Wealth, or pleasure? Aviation for the masses is closely associated with holidays – perhaps Green attacks against it are a form of puritanism?
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
gman said:
The current fleet average takeoff to landing is about 50 passenger-miles per gallon corrected for JET A-1 and assuming a 80% load factor. Typically cars average between 15 to 40 unit miles per gallon (world estimate)
The numbers for air travel would improve considerably if average gage was increased (more widebody aircraft) and even more if flying was only used for routes over 1000 miles.
Don’t even ask what a helicopter gets
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
DV82XL said:
That surprises me. To be clear, are you referring to private jets in general or to the airline-class ones? I had been under the impression that Gulfstream and Bombardier/Learjet had a very comprehensive program for after-purchase maintain ace and upkeep.
If you want to travel in style, it is fairly easy to rent or charter a corporate jet like that. Lots of services exist and there are also many jets owned privately that spend more time on the ground than in the sky and which can be rented out during their down time.
The newer Gulfstreams are amazing inside and out.
If we’re talking about airline-size jets, there are different levels of luxury avaliable on those. There are some which are avaliable for charter and are just standard passenger layouts. If you want them to be all first class, with extra large seats and everything, they can sometimes swap those out pretty fast. These are the kind of aircraft that are intended for the group market or may even be hired to fill in gaps by airlines if there is a major shortage of aircraft for some reason. They’re also chartered by the government for moving troops around or as air ambulances etc.
There are also some appointed as all premier first class and owned by various sports teams or other organizations that involve a lot of travel.
Then there are the uber-ritzy ones. Some being privately owned by individuals. Donald Trump has a 727. It can occasionally be rented out. Apparently has a bedroom, extended galley and other such luxuries. The 727 has been popular for that kind of conversion to a kind of supersized corporate jet. John Travolta has an ex-Quantas extended range 707 with similar appointments.
I am VERY surprised that maintainace would be any issue at all on these. While airline class maintainace is expensive, there are two reasons why I am so surprised it would be an issue: First, these aircraft spend a lot of time on the ground and not in flight. Low flight hours per year mean less wear and tear. Secondly, the fact that many are 727’s or early generation 737’s or even 707’s, DC-9’s and so on. These aircraft were overbuilt. Especially ones like the 707 are amazingly rugged, tough and capable. The military has found that the original ratings for maximum pressurized hours were extremely conservative and testing has revealed they can safely go far beyond this. A KC-135 (which is a 707 with big tanks and a refueling boom) will bring the crew back safely with two engines on fire, half the vertical stabilizer missing and a gaping hole in the side of the cabin.
In light of that, I’m surprised that these would really be a problem to keep up.
DV82XL said:
That always surprised me. I personally have no problem with being flexible on hours and I’m surprised so many are so demanding of the frequency of the service. I can easily see how buisiness travelers would be, but I am always surprised that there is not enough of a market of leisure travelers or others who are willing to support a big-gauge, low number airline.
Like most, I’m not crazy about layovers, but they’re hardly a deal breaker if the price is right.
I can’t think of a single incident where I’ve felt the need to fly at 2:00 and not 4:00.
There are plenty of airlines which operate many many flights per day between major airports. For example, they might have 12 flights between JFK and Chicago in a day or 16 between Chicago and Atlanta. I would think there are plenty of people who would have no problem accommodating a system with a “Morning, Afternoon, Evening and Night” kind of flight service, as opposed to one that has flights every 45 minutes to hour and a half.
Obviously there are some airports and routes where it’s not realistic to have such large aircraft, but is there a single day that goes by that there are not at least a few thousand people who want to go from the New York area to Los Angles or from Chicago to Orlando? Hell, there have got to be at least enough people to fill a several Jumbos just on a route like Boston to San Fransisco or Atlanta to Denver.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:31 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The air taxi/charter carriers use the smaller business-jet equipment don’t usually have maintenance issues – what they do have is cash-flow issues and they come and go (often with the same personal) regularly. Times like this are very hard on these operators. The profit margins are razor thin and the fixed costs are high. The point I am trying to make is that the top end to the market for air travel is very soft and it is not easy to make a business serving it when times are bad.
The big private jets, the ‘flying mansions’ types, unless they are maintained by and for a government are usually junk heaps. The law, because it was written with scheduled carriers in mind, is full of loopholes that let these thing keep flying. Because they are not putting in the time in flight, many of the time-ex triggers that mandate certain inspections and maintenance evolutions don’t get tripped. But for a lot of things on an airframe, sitting on the ground doesn’t stop corrosion, particularly if the inhibiting programs are not kept up. The rules don’t say you have to strip your airplane down to the ribs every two years and spray oil on everything, it just says that after a certain number of flight hours you have to inspect the ribs and stringers for corrosion. I have been there when the floor-panels were removed from the rear cargo compartment of a low-time but calendar old DC-9 (ex Turkish) and all that was there instead of the frame was white dust. This was at the second mandated inspection of that part of this aircraft.
I might add that we called in the feds on this one who promptly declared that this was no longer an aircraft and we had to fix it or cut it up, because it was not flying out in its present state.
Yes, the early narrow-body jets were built tough, which is why these things keep flying until some inspector grounds them, but your hair would curl if you saw some of the thing that went on. I won’t give a name because I heard this second hand but one well known big private jet came into the airport I was working in at the time and the service crew was telling us that flight crew was re-stuffing a blanket in the crack of one of the doors so that the airplane would pressurize in flight.
As for the gage thing, there is still a lot of fat that could be cut from the system, and it will be over time.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
But wouldn’t the ideal world envisioned by the Greens basically eliminate these problems?
In their ideal future, you would have a few people who are deemed important enough to fly who would own aircraft and they would be maintained by the huge amount of cheap human labor.
Yeah, sure it’s hard to keep an aircraft up and running and in good condition and the air taxi services have hard times. That’s in the current world. It’s also extremely expensive to keep a regular mansion and that’s why so few old manner estates are still maintained as private residences. If you return to the feudal system, it becomes very easy to maintain a large estate like that because you have so many who are, for all intents and purposes, slaves.
In the system that the Green side of things really wants, you wouldn’t have the same kind of economic upswings and downswings. You’d have nobility and everyone else is dirt poor. The nobelity is not simply rich in money terms, they are also given a social class that makes them entitled to more and considered important.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Q said:
The ideal world envisioned by Greenpee is one where everyone gives them money to protest against things that will never actually change.
As for the true Green ideologues, I suspect they see a world without mechanized travel above that of a bicycle, nevermind aircraft.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Well, I think part of it is that they would prefer that something like air travel be cut back and basically nationalized, as it is generally anti-capitalism that runs in the blood of most of the supporters of these organizations. Their ideal is that there would be luxuriously appointed aircraft which would carry around those who are seen as important enough to deserve it.
Clearly the idea of mass economics is not part of this. You only need to look at the Greenpeace ships. They burn tons of dirty fuel and they spend a lot of money to make sure they have always-on broadband internet. Few yatchs could rival what they have. They believe this is okay and that it should be supported by their contributions because they are so important.
@DV82XL: I appreciate your experience and you make good points. However, you are talking about air taxi services and alike operating in what is basically a free market that is driven by mass consumerism where the little guys collectively can sway things. I don’t think this is what they are shooting for. You can have very expensive aircraft like the ones used to carry heads of state without a problem, if you just spread the cost onto the backs of everyone else.
The Green ideal is a tightly controlled system where most everyone lives in very small homes and never has the chance to leave their local community. However, they also say that there is some purpose for technology like aviation, but only in circumstances where it is needed for important things. I even saw this in an editorial in the Ecologist. It explicitly stated that flying was okay, but only if limited to important matters and not “frivolous” use like vacations and that a society should decide when someone is entitled to fly.
Who do you think would be? Their fantasy is that they would be a kind of royalty who travels because their message and agenda is so important. They would fly in the lavish jets from place to place for the purpose of lecturing to the peons about how important it is to conserve.
It’s like organic agriculture: if you have enough people tilling enough land, you’ll always be able to produce enough food to feed the elite. You might have the serfs go hungry some years, and without modern technology they’ll never be able to produce enough food to actually break free of the manor. Even in a bad harvest year there is still enough food for the lord of the estate.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
DV82XL said:
I disagree. We have seen Greenpeace has no problems with changing about energy conservation as they lean out the window of their private helicopter.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Oh, but of course! they are, after all, part of The Power Elite, or at least want to be….
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
You know I have to admit, I am a little jealous of that Hughes 500 helicopter every time I see them using it to pull stunts like swoop down on something or carry a big banner and orbit a protest. It’s a very nimble and maneuverable little helicopter. It has a pretty high performance engine for its size. There’s a reason that it is used in recreational touring as well as specialized law enforcement.
I once had the opportunity to go out in a small aircraft, with no place to go and no other use for it other than amusement. Using an airplane as a play-thing for low altitude buzzes, touch and goes and a little sight-seeing is really a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. It’s terrifically entertaining and a lot more fun than other pleasure craft like dirt bikes or jetskis can be.
I’d imagine having free use of a Hughes 500 to go pull stunts and have at your disposal, paid for by donations must be a great perk. The big bonus is you can even do this stuff in controlled airspace and urban areas, since the “Greenpeace” title gives you the political clout to completely disregard any and all laws and regulations in broad daylight.
It seats four comfortably and a maximum of five if you squeeze three in in back.
Of course, it ain’t cheap. A good condition low-hour used 500 will be a minimum of about half a million US Dollars and it can burn through it’s 64 gallon onboard fuel supply in less than 3 hours (or about five hours with the 109 gallon total fuel supply, using the auxiliary tank)
But hey, what are donations for, right?
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Engineering Edgar said:
As I am sure you know a piece of modern technology, like a large jet aircraft is the product of the large infrastructure needed to create it. A culture can drop below the point where it is capable of making one of these things because of the lack of trained people and the lack of specialized material ( like the superalloys used in the engines) and this applies to several areas of technology that depends on a mass market at lower level to support a small market at the upper level.
At any rate Greenpeace ® doesn’t want anything other than to keep the donations flowing in. The prefer targets that somewhat unpopular that they can beat on continuously with no real danger that something will happen that will force them to declare victory. They are not activists, they are con artists. They don’t give a damn about the issues beyond their ability to motivate the suckers to cough up cash.
The ideological True Green, (who make up a significant portion of Greenpeace® cash cows, and foot troops) live in a fantasy world totally divorced from reality, where we all can return to some imagined idyllic age before technology ruined everything, and they were marginalized. These folk don’t care about aviation, and believe that they can live in an agrarian world very much like the fictional one created and popularized in Edwardian children’s literature, or as I like to say: like the Shire of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit.
I think it is important to make the distinction between these two elements in the green movement.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:14 pm
DV82XL said:
Meh.. that might be the case. I mean, what they really want is donations as I am sure they don’t expect their “perfect world” to actually happen. Just the same, they do enjoy condemning air travel even as they fly on a combination of Lear Jets and first class to their conferences. They don’t care. Why should they? They’re not the dirty ones who use those things frivolously.
Yeah, the foot soldiers probably have not thought very hard about the complete implications of what they are fighting for. It’s one of those things where you can’t really think of it too hard or it all falls apart.
However, one should also remember that you don’t need to have a society capable of making super-alloys or other aircraft technology in order to fly in aircraft. Three words: New Old Stock.
After the fall of Rome, in the Middle Ages, some of the best and most prized weapons were Roman. Even hundreds of years later, since the ability to make them had been lost, they were highly prized and kinds horded any they could get their hands on. Of course, as time went on they would get broken or lost and hence their value increased, for those that remained.
I could imagine if some of the Green leaders had it their way, the aircraft factories would be shut down, but thousands of low-hour airframes would be maintained in the desert by an army of slave labor, who spend their days going over each airframe and removing every speck of corrosion. These would serve their needs for several generations.
Quote Comment
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
drbuzz0 said:
An interesting idea for a science-fiction plot, but it really doesn’t reflect the reality of the sort of maintenance that an aircraft needs. Even mothballing a plane for the desert and unmothballing for return to flight worthiness is a complex process, that needs be done by a highly skilled workforce that needs to know exactly what they are doing. Not the sort of labor that is typically available from slaves.
As for them being hypocrites, that’s almost axiomatic, on these pages at least. They can do damage and need to be opposed, no question, but they will find the the aviation industry has more political acumen than some of their other targets like nuclear energy and won’t rollover for them. Aviation has had to fight special interests for almost its whole existence, and has become very good at defending itself, Greepee might have bitten off more than they can chew going after them.
Many of the tactics Greenpeace has used in other areas, like hijacking coal ships and forced occupation will not be met with the same degree of tolerance and forbearance that they have enjoyed to date. After that spectacle in the U.K., I am certain they were told that next time things will get harsh. Greenpeace made the mistake of making security at that airport look like fools, I sure that will not happen again.
Quote Comment
September 24th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Greenpeace’s problem is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce CO2 emissions is to replace coal and natural gas power plants with nuclear power and they would rather melt the icecaps than let that happen. In the US 56% of CO2 emissions comes from Coal and Natural Gas (http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/greenhouse/Chapter1.htm). It is hardly surprising that they come up with fantasies like attacking air travel.
Quote Comment
September 24th, 2009 at 2:49 am
The topic of luxury personal aircraft and how safe they may or may not be and of air taxi etc is all fascinating, but to get back on the topic:
Al Gore got some criticism (although not nearly enough) because he was flying around to promote his global warming book/movie in a private jet (and not one of those little six passenger Lears either). You know, he being Al Gore apparently can’t ride in passenger planes or even a low-end corporate jet. It has to be one of those big ones Embraer makes.
There was a story several years ago about the big shots at one of those environmental organizations (not Greenpeace, I don’t remember which one. It might have been the Green Party) taking out a lease on a Gulfstream V to fly around to protests and things like that. Again, it was under-reported.
Then you have Greenpeace using their private helicopter to pull stunts and go out for random joyrides or ferry them to and from their ship. A small helicopter is about the most ineffectient method around, per-passenger of moving people.
Their ships are tricked out with everything from high speed internet via satellite to air conditioning and large freezers, so they don’t have to eat canned food or anything like that. Granted, it would mean they could have a smaller generator and not produce as much exhaust, but do they care?
I have seen some of their leaders interviewed in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. How do you figure they get from one of those to the other? I’m going to have to guess they didn’t swim!
They think flying is frivolous. Heaven forbid they build a runway that might reduce congestion and the delays and headaches for a poor schmuck like you or me. They want to make it so expensive that I can’t go on a vacation with my family or attend my nephew’s wedding because that would be too frivolous and bad for the enviornment! They think it’s so bad that you and I need to be guilted over it and if that doesn’t work they’ll bleed our wallets until we cry uncle and don’t go flying.
At the same time they’re flying in their helicopters, corporate jets or first class on a carrier and going out on their yacht to harass a hard working fisherman or the crew of a freighter. They think this is all okay, because their message is so important that they are entitled to this! Not only that, they think **they** are so important that they need to personally be taken from place to place to tell us how bad we are. Sure, they could just have a native of the area run the protest or they could comment over the internet or on television, but NO! They’re SO ****IN IMPORTANT that they have to physically get sent all the way from the ****ing Netherlands to explain to Australians or Canadians or whatever other far-flung place it might be how this all works!
Hell, we should feel privileged to even have them grace us with their presence that we may smell their holy farts! (that’s sarcasm)
Does this make anyone else sick?
Quote Comment
September 24th, 2009 at 4:45 am
We can’t ever get greenhouse gas emissions down to zero. That is for sure. Things decay. Fires happen. People breathe. Trees fall down and rot. Acid comes in contact with calcium carbonate. Carbon dioxide is not a deadly gas, and (assuming that the whole climate change thing is as bad as some say), it is not that carbon dioxide exists that is the problem, but the fact that it is produced in quantities larger than are absorbed by sinks by many times over.
I am left thinking of the saying “don’t sweat the small stuff.” I don’t see how aircraft is in any way a logical place to try to look for room to cut back. Compared to coal or even road transport, I’d be more than willing to accept the emissions of aircraft as too small to be overly concerned about.
Quote Comment
September 25th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Polo in Corsica?
I find it difficult to believe that game is ever played on that island.
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Greenpeace ® doesn’t want anything other than to keep the donations flowing in. The prefer targets that somewhat unpopular that they can beat on continuously with no real danger that something will happen that will force them to declare victory. They are not activists, they are con artists. They don’t give a damn about the issues beyond their ability to motivate the suckers to cough up cash.
The ideological True Green, (who make up a significant portion of Greenpeace® cash cows, and foot troops) live in a fantasy world totally divorced from reality, where we all can return to some imagined idyllic age before technology ruined everything, and they were marginalized. These folk don’t care about aviation, and believe that they can live in an agrarian world…
Back in 1976, Samuel Florman made this point in “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” — that many of the Antitech folks around even then thought that the Middle Ages was the best era of mankind–every peasant having his 40 acres to feed his family. You can see hints of this in the local grown movement.
RE aircraft and CO2: Although I have not run the numbers (naughty) I have wondered about fueling commercial aircraft with hydrogen. The fantasy would be airports paved with photovoltacs, differentiating water, collecting the H2 and compressing it into airplanes. Advantage would be you’d have trained people to handle the H2, and the gas could be produced during daylight and stored for use later. (and no, I do not think the planes would be lighter than air!) Dunno if a gas turbine could be taught to eat H2, but it’s something to think about.
Likewise, I wish they’d work harder on building a fuel-cell railroad locomotive with a hydrogen tender…
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Chas, PE SE said:
Gas turbines have no issue burning H2. However hydrogen simply doesn’t have the energy density for this application with current storage technology.
In the end when it comes to GHG mitigation we have to go for the ones that can be most easily replaced and those with the biggest impact. CO2 from aviation fit nether of these two criteria. It is the same situation for rail motive power.
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
DV82XL said:
I could see hydrogen being used for rail travel more easily than it could be for aviation. It could be in a couple of tanker cars behind a locomotive. However aircraft is very difficult. The volume needed for hydrogen and the amount of insulation it would require (since it’s only reasonable to use in liquid phase, kept at very low temperatures) precludes the use of any kind of conventional wing or fuselage tank for storage.
The necessity of large tanks and a very low density fuel is justified in spacecraft, where weight matters much more than volume and where specific impulse from the rocket engine is a top priority. But in airplanes? No way.
Here’s an image of a concept plane to run on liquid hydrogen: http://www.alexstoll.com/AircraftOfTheMonth/HAirbus.jpg
Seriously, give me a break! Even that ridiculous thing would only be good for regional travel. It couldn’t do transatlantic service even with that big tank. Another concept I’ve seen amounts to something like a 747 or Airbus A380 where the first third of the fuselage is passenger accommodations and storage and the rear two thirds is a massive hydrogen tank. Again: give me a break!
Of course, this all assumes you have built a source of huge amounts of carbon-free H2. If you’re still making it from steam reforming natural gas, then the whole purpose is defeated.
Then there’s the safety issue. Despite the movies, Jet-A fuel is not explosive in its liquid form at all. It will burn, but it has a high flash point and is difficult to ignite. Most incidents where aircraft are damaged and start leaking fuel do not involve any kind of fire. Hydrogen, however, can be easily ignited at a variety of concentrations. Even worse, if the tanks are breached and it spills, it will evaporate explosively. The temperatures present a huge danger. Explosive evaporation would also produce a huge temperature drop. If the tank started to leak and hydrogen trickled onto structural members of the aircraft, it could crack them due to thermal shock. If you get Jet-A on your skin, you wash it off. Liquid hydrogen will flash freeze any flesh it comes into contact with and completely kill it. (Ever had a wart removed by liquid nitrogen?)
Transferring liquid hydrogen to a tank like that is also a dangerous procedure. As it is pumped from storage into the cryotank, some of it boils off, creating a cloud of hydrogen vapor. When NASA transfers hydrogen to the tanks of the Shuttle or other spacecraft, they need to use an elaborate safety system that sucks the boil off vapors and pumps them away to a flare stack.
I would not want to ride on a hydrogen aircraft, and even if the fuel were dirt cheap, I suspect that the amount of difficulty it would present logistically would negate any savings.
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
That photo looks as if the top half or 40 percent of the fuselage were full of liquid hydrogen. A cylinder 50 m long by 6 m diameter, times 40 percent, makes 560 m^3, and at 20.3 K and 1 bar that’s 40000 kg lH2, equivalent to 100000 kg kerosene.
So I think you are wrong: it could too cross the Atlantic. The 60-tonne savings, less a little for insulation, is part of a virtuous, not a virtuous cycle, but a virtuous converging series: a little less fuel is needed to propel the fuel load.
(How fire can be domesticated)
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
GRLCowan said:
That’s not a photo, it’s an “artists rendering” – thus far, nobody has been dumb enough to build one. It’s basically an airbus 310. It’s known as the “Cryoplane” The range of the A310-200 is 6,800 km, alough there is an extended range version of the A310-300 that can do 9,600 km. That would be the trans-Atlantic version, altough the A310 is not so popular for long haul flights, so that version is not that common.
The Cryoplane is anticipated to have a range of a good 30% less. I believe that would be as compared to the standard 200 series A310
New York to London is 5586 km. Of course, it can be more if there is a headwind and you have to go into a holding pattern for a little while before landing.
Not a whole lot of margin there. Any way, you sure as hell would never fly Los Angeles to Paris or Rome to Tokyo with that thing.
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
GRLCowan said:
Yes, most of these H2 aircraft ideas claim to be able to make it across the Atlantic, but that isn’t the point. They would not be so good trans-Pacific needing stopovers, fuel handling is complex and expensive, but most of all, it’s just not needed.
If we were to generate all of our electric power from nuclear, drove grid-powered electric road vehicles, and had nuclear powered ships, the amount of pollution generated by aviation from the combustion of carbon fuels would be more than acceptable.
This is totally unnecessary and draws attention away from the real issues.
Quote Comment
September 26th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Tupolev did some flight experiments with hydrogen and methane burning jets (actually dual fuel). The other current hydrogen powered aircraft use fuel cells and are very small.
DV82XL said:
Isn’t that the whole point?
Quote Comment
September 27th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I just saw this on the web:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cvK9vxA6M
Of course the film makers are howling hypocrites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cvK9vxA6M
As for the cryoplane, well anybody who actually had to work with Hydrogen knows why it’s very bad idea.
Quote Comment
September 27th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Anonymous said:
I’ve seen fuel cell aircraft, but that’s really a gimmick. You can power a small aircraft on electricity, but only barely and it’s just a bad choice. Electric motors are heavy. Fuel cell stacks are heavy. Electric props can’t compete with gas turbines for performance.
Yeah, I do know that Tupolev did some experiments. I don’t believe they ever came up with a credible design for an all hydrogen aircraft – or a reason for wanting one. Methane has much less energy density than Jet-A, but at least it’s a lot better than hydrogen.
The Tu-156 has flown on all methane, it reduces the range but it could be more economical in areas of Russia where methane is avaliable cheaply. That said, nobody has shown a whole lot of interest in it.
Quote Comment
April 14th, 2010 at 5:33 am
Absolutely liked reading through this posting. Your web site is definately one for my bookmarks. Best wishes. Toby
Quote Comment