Switching from fossil-fuel-based, conventional jet fuel to alternative fuels with lower net life-cycle carbon emissions is another tactic. The most straightforward - applying to subsonic aircraft too - is improving aerodynamics and developing more efficient engines. The three companies plan to address the emissions challenge in several ways. That’s just the laws of physics,” says Gene Holloway, chief sustainability officer at Reno, Nevada-based Aerion. “We fully recognize that we are going to pump out more greenhouse gases than a subsonic aircraft will. Fundamentally, flying faster requires more energy and fuel burn, translating to greater emissions. Yet such heights pose new climate-warming emissions complications. Cruising above 50,000 feet, exclusively in the stratosphere’s thinner air, cuts down on heat-generating, airframe-stressing, and fuel-efficiency-eating resistance. Supersonic planes add to this challenge by flying higher and faster than their subsonic cousins. But elsewhere, the aviation industry is under scrutiny for its small yet sizeable and growing greenhouse emissions, uniquely damaging because of their deposition at altitude. The U.S., at least at the moment, has not made regulating carbon emissions from aircraft (or anything, really) a priority. All must deal with the overland supersonic ban and now also a hot issue that was not on the agenda in the Concorde’s heyday: carbon emissions. Capping a fraught 27-year run, the last Concorde took off from JFK airport and touched down at Heathrow in 2003, completing a final trans-Atlantic crossing.įlash forward to 2019, and a new class of supersonic aircraft entrepreneurs - led by Aerion Supersonic of Nevada, Boom Supersonic of Colorado and Spike Aerospace of Massachusetts - has taken up the torch. Maintenance and fuel costs continued to spiral far higher than expected. A ban on overland sonic booms in the United States, a major aviation market, limited the sound-barrier-busting aircraft to servicing a few American cities relatively close to coastlines. Orders for the pioneering aircraft failed to materialize instead of an anticipated fleet of hundreds, only 14 Concordes ever flew commercially. Life turned hard for supersonic enthusiasts at British Airways and Air France not long after they started flying Concordes in 1976 on regularly scheduled routes from London to Bahrain and Paris to Rio de Janeiro. The industry has some creative ideas for addressing the problem. They’ll need to convince a climate-change-rattled world that their comfort won’t make the greenhouse gas problem a whole lot worse. Those who want to revive supersonic passenger flight will need to do more than build Mach 1 aircraft. Supersonic’s not-so-super emissions By Adam Hadhazy | October 2019
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