In July, Lockheed Martin completed the build of NASA’s X-59 test aircraft, which is designed to turn sonic booms into mere thumps, in the hope of making overland supersonic flight a possibility. Ground tests and a first test flight are planned for later in the year. NASA aims to have enough data to hand over to US regulators in 2027.
I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?
Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?
Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?
Good news, they’re building a really cool new facility in washing state which uses carbon captured from the air to create jet fuel, the big idea is when the wind is blowing hard and there’s spare power from turbines they ramp up sequestering carbon from their air and the process of turning it into jet fuel meaning they can make use of power that would otherwise be over capacity by creating carbon neutral jet fuel.
The air force tested it in all their engines and it works great, of course it’ll take time to build the faculty and surrounding infrastructure but it’s a huge development, especially as it’s not a hugely complex tech so we might well see it evolved into being relatively cheap to build - maybe even we’ll see airports making use of their vast amounts of surface area with solar panels and creating carbon neutral jet fuel in site - would be a huge infrastructure saving and create more of a market for carbon which could drive carbon capture projects.
One exciting possibility is an experimental faculty in Cambridgeshire, UK which burns biomas to generate power and uses a fraction of that power to capture carbon from the burnt material - it appears to be a really effective way of pulling carbon from the air so if automated construction and management allow us to get the costs down to a point where it rapidly pays for itself while also making power and collecting carbon then we could well see something like that built at every airport in the world.
This would vastly reduce the carbon footprint of air travel to make it far better than other options for long and medium journeys while also reducing cost by cutting the need for hugely expensive oil mining and refining infrastructure, plus they’d have to remove eco taxes from air trave.
Tl;Dr - they’re already working on that, if we manage to make flying carbon neutral then a faster turn around time on jets is also a good thing ecologically and costwise because we could have less of them in fleets meaning resource costs are lower.
Less carbon footprint is not profitable. People would not pay more brcause they have a less carbin efect on a flight. People will pay more for a reans Atlantic 3hr flight.
A lower carbon footprint means less fuel, which accounts for 40% of the airline’s cost