Aviation News Recap (Allplane Newsletter #53) - 21 June 2021
One more week full of news and stories in the aviation world…and, as usual, starting with the ever hotter (pun intended!) green flight scene: electric flight, hydrogen, batteries, sustainable aviation fuel…so many initiatives taking place simultaneously that it is easy to lose track…unless you subscribe to our newsletter!
So there we go…
Green Aviation News
CFM, the joint venture between engine makers GE Aviation and Safran, presented its RISE open rotor engine, which is expected to cut emissions by 20% and be able to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel. For the general public, though, the most eye-catching feature of this new engine is doubtlessly going to be the fact that it is…emmh, open…with visible (not encased) fan blades.
The road to zero emissions according to Glenn Llewellyn, Vice-President of Zero-Emission Aircraft at Airbus. Read it here.
“Is green supersonic flight an oxymoron?” a few days after Boom made headlines with its United Airlines prospective deal, this article on New Scientist takes a look at the environmental side of the supersonic flight project and it isn’t convinced….
Former Airbus CEO Tom Enders is going to chair the board of directors at German eVTOL startup Lilium. Mr. Enders had joined the board in January 2021.
Rolls-Royce is investing £80m ($110M) in energy storage systems for aviation (aka batteries). To learn more about batteries and their current technological constraints, check out this podcast with the founder and CEO of Cuberg, one of the leading players in this field.
A Singaporean firm called HES Energy Systems is working on an unmanned regional hydrogen-electric aircraft. This is a clean-sheet design with distributed power and a range of 5,000km. Interestingly it uses the interchangeable hydrogen tanks concept (think of it as “Nespresso capsules”) that the likes of Universal Hydrogen are working on. They plan to do a test flight on the old Aéropostale route across the South Atlantic!
A researcher at MIT has come up with an aircraft concept that has no moving parts. It is propelled by ion thrust technology, which apparently is used on some spacecraft, but hard to use in the Earth’s atmosphere. The aircraft’s design looks more like one the Wright’s Brother contraptions than the type of aircraft we are used to seeing today, yet, it seems that it could have some interesting applications due to the fact it is extremely silent. Read about this interesting project here.
An aircraft powered by a fuel cell that converts energy from hydrogen to electric power managed completed a 240km emissions free flight in the framework of the pan-European Mahepa project. The plan is to scale this up to get to fly a 40-seat aircraft over 2,500km.
Nice video presenting the Voltaero Cassio 330. To learn more about this French green flight startup, check out this piece.
In the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) scene, some new initiatives took shape this week:
LanzaJet is to build an alcohol to jet fuel plant in South Wales, in the UK. The US-based SAF producer has ongoing close relationships with two major UK airlines: BA and Virgin Atlantic. Here’s a thorough report on GreenAir News.
Finnish SAF producer Neste signed an agreement with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for employees of this major consultancy firm to purchase SAF when travelling on SAS or Finnair. The voluntary purchase of (more pricey) SAF is quite a thing in Scandinavia (check out this podcast with Swedish green aviation expert Maria Fiskerud in which we talk about this matter)
And we don’t leave the Nordics just yet, because FAIR, an initiative to promote the adoption of electric aviation) has published this report about the opportunities to develop regional electric aviation in the Kvarken region of Northern Sweden and Finland. We had the chance to cover this project in this other piece.
Picture: La Poste
Last but not least, one for the stamp collecting aficionados out there: the French postal service (La Poste) is issuing a stamp dedicated to the Solar Impulse experimental aircraft (the Swiss post did the same back in 2016). Time to remember that we had one of the two people that flew the Solar Impulse, André Borschberg, here on the Allplane podcast talking about electric aviation!
What else?
The Boeing 737 MAX 10 doing taxi tests. Here’s a video of the moment.
Also MAX-related, Ryanair got the first of the type (it’s got another 209 on order!) which it calls “Gamechanger”. The Ryanair MAXes are configured to carry almost 200 passengers.
Stunning “Freedom One” Southwest B737 livery to honour employees of the airline that are veterans. Check out those two pieces about the process of painting an aircraft and about some of the most amazing airline liveries out there.
AirAsia is getting into the food delivery business in Singapore, in line with its stated strategy of being a digital platform with an airline attached, rather than the other way around
Vueling is lauching “Vueling Global”, a service to facilitate connecting flights with other partner airlines, starting with fellow IAG member LEVEL (which makes sense given the fact both are based in Barcelona and have complementary route networks). It is not the first time that Vueling experiments with flight connections, will see how this scales this time. Vueling Global is powered by technology of Icelandic firm Dohop.
More airlines added to the 2021 airlines launch list!