71–80 of 106 posts
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
I think it’s important to look at this from a different angle: sure their requirements are high, and they may not be able to go completely green in a short timeframe, but should we therefor not even attempt it? It’s not difficult to imagine a hybrid system at some point in the near future, and/or other ways of reducing the carbon footprint. Focus on those positive things, rather than “this will never be completely gr…
The article mentions the delta wing design may save 20% on fuel consumption. However those gains are completely swallowed by the traffic increase which is about +30% every 10 years if I remember correctly.
The target for 2050 is completely unrealistic, considering the traffic increase and the long cycles of the aviation industry. It may be achieved with hydrogen, assuming it can be produced in large enough quantities with renewables.
"should we therefor not even attempt it?"
Oh they certainly want to look as if they were trying to reach there objectives ... for the moment it is business as usual. The production of conventional, kerosene powered planes has never been so high and still increasing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In WW2 the Germans fitted aircraft engines to their tanks, which worked great when the engines ran, but too often they didn't due to battlefield conditions. (Germany was also terribly short of avgas, which crippled those tanks.) This sounded interesting so I skimmed the tanks mentioned in [0] and only found mention of prototypes exploring use of a turboshaft engine [1] from [2]. [1] explicitly states "none of these…
I didn't mean a gas turbine engine, but a piston engine designed for aircraft. (Gas turbines don't run on avgas.) With a quick look I can't find a cite for my claim, just that the British did use Merlin aviation engines in some of their tanks.
Is a large part of this also a political issue? with subsidies and tax breaks on fuel the aviation industry is not really incentivised to innovate and cosumers are not incentivised to seek other modes of transport since flying is often the cheapest and fastest.
Every single mode of transport is subsidized so its hard to say if air transportation is getting more or less incentives. Using Swedish numbers and some estimates. Tax on car owners only pay around 1/3 of the road network. The ticket price on train, according to a person working in that space, said that the ticket paid about 2/3 of the costs that the train company paid for any given trip. The train network also get i…
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
Train is better for short hops between highly populated areas, but not so much between islands with 10k peoples. Many short flights are between places where only other option is car + many hours on ferry, and for them an electric plane would be perfect
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only solution is to have some type of carbon tax on local travels and use it to reinvest in a train network. A lot of the air flights in North America would be better served by high speed trains. We won’t have an alternative to long distance flights, but there is one for shorter flights.
In Europe train is already quite a nice way to get around. I live in the UK and caught a train to London then a Eurotunnel train to Paris and it was probably quicker and easier when you account for time spent in departures and going through airport security.
It seems that the cost of an additional passenger on a train is almost zero, so why do trains not attempt to reduce per-ticket prices to increase capacity and become more competitive against low cost airlines?
In your example, the train from London to Paris in my experience has almost always been nearly triple the cost of a flight.
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
I hope blimps make a comeback, they have a lot of potential. Especially considering high speed rail is bound to stay limited to busiest connections, given the fixed costs and required high passenger volumes.
That means they’d probably cost more than commercial jets, because the crew is being paid for a longer period of time.
It also seems like jets can fly in far more inclement weather than blimps, but I’m no expert in that.
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
Only solution is to have some type of carbon tax on local travels and use it to reinvest in a train network. A lot of the air flights in North America would be better served by high speed trains. We won’t have an alternative to long distance flights, but there is one for shorter flights.
The east coast is already covered by an excellent train line. That line could be made faster to be more competitive but it already handles far more passengers than air.
Now let’s look at some other popular routes.
Chicago to LA? 2,000 miles. That would take around 10 hours nonstop on the fastest high speed train. Make that even worse for New York to LA, and you can bundle in destinations like Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, etc into those long distance routes that simply don’t make sense from an eastern city.
How about popular vacation routes, like Boston to Orlando? 1300 miles, so that’s at least 7 hours assuming the train never stops.
The new-ish Amtrak CEO is correct to focus on intercity routes that are between closely packed cities. The US does need more train routes similar to the Hiawatha Service or Northwest Corridor and they need to go faster.
But even this type of buildout will be limited when you consider the size of cities in the US. If you fly from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh you’ll be on a 50 seat jet or you’ll transfer to somewhere like Detroit. What sort of train carrying 50 people will be anywhere close to economically viable?
Sure, we could use some rail connection between something like Houston and Dallas but then those passengers will also have to rent a car or use a taxi frequently at their destination. At that point you are competing with individual driving.
Back to the Hiawatha Service, if I’ve got two people in my party it’d be cheaper to drive and possibly even Uber the entire way if I had four people in my party.
The leader in high speed rail, China, has nearly ideal conditions to work with. They have huge populations concentrated in dense urban areas with low car ownership. They have almost all major cities concentrated on on one coast. They have low labor costs and a centralized government structure that doesn’t have to consider property rights or environmental impact when building out infrastructure.
Aviation looks like the industry least likely to go green to me. I doubt electric planes are ever going to be viable for anything other than a short hop which would be better done by train. Synthetic fuels sounds interesting until you look at how much fuel they consume. The trend is quite obviously in the wrong direction: https://www.statista.com/statistics/655057/fuel-consumption-... It's often quoted as 2% of globa…
I think it’s important to look at this from a different angle: sure their requirements are high, and they may not be able to go completely green in a short timeframe, but should we therefor not even attempt it? It’s not difficult to imagine a hybrid system at some point in the near future, and/or other ways of reducing the carbon footprint. Focus on those positive things, rather than “this will never be completely gr…
The heavier a plane is, the more fuel it needs. But fuel has weight, too, which means you need even more fuel! Reducing fuel consumption translates to exponential operational savings.This is also why planes with batteries are problematic: batteries store much less energy per kg than fossil fuel. I doubt that the increased efficiency in going electric is going to offset the extra consumption due to the increased weight.
Even if they reduce emissions by 50% by 2050, flying will still produce ~5 more times CO2 than taking the train. And guess, what? The railway industry is also working to reduce emissions and with trains there's just so much more you can improve with much less investment.
By 2050, aviation might very well produce ~20 times the emissions of railways, even though it has halved its emissions.So, with our current knowledge, the best way to reduce aviation emissions is...taking the train.