Airbus used the Farnborough Airshow to launch its Fly Your Ideas competition, inviting students to develop their ides for greener air travel. The aerospace giant has also produced a report,
The Future, speculating on how aircraft and airports might be designed in 2050 and beyond.
Among the industry’s great and the good who descended on Farnborough for global aviation’s bi-annual UK knees-up, is Charles Champion, executive vice president of engineering at Airbus.
Along with Robin Mannings, independent futurologist, Champion spoke to Businessgreen.com about how aviation is defying its traditional association with carbon-belching hardware, and Airbus’s grand schemes for a greener future of air transport.
Businessgreen.com: What affect will inclusion in the European ETS have on the aviation industry? Is the aviation industry, in fact, beginning what will be a fight for survival in its current form?
Robin Mannings: People may ask whether, in the era of the internet, we need to travel at all. The answer is yes, there is still a need for face-to-face human interaction. But that has to be balanced with GHG emissions and other environmental concerns. The aviation industry is already making big strides in terms of fuel efficiency and materials design and is on course to be more fuel efficient than any other form of transport.
Charles Champion: Air traffic management (ATM) has an important role to play here. When we flew in from Toulouse yesterday we spent 20 minutes circling. That’s 20 minutes of wasted fuel. One of aspects we are working on at Airbus is how we might integrate the aircraft into the whole system of ATM, so that aircraft can fly – safely – closer together in formation.
Businessgreen.com:
The Futurereport sees a utopian future where air travel continues to grow unabated. Does Airbus have a plan B for a dystopian future where the aviation industry is shrunk by environmental constraints?
Charles Champion: For that document we drew a lot on our discussions with young people, to find out if they thought air travel would be a thing of the past. But what they told us is that they expect to travel even more than people do today. However, they also want to travel in a more cost-efficient and environmentally friendly way.
Over the last 40 years of mass air travel the aviation industry has improved fuel efficiency by 70 per cent and reduced noise drastically. We expect to halve fuel consumption again in the next 20 years and eventually have an industry that is carbon-neutral or even has a positive impact on emissions.
Businessgreen.com: Will there come a time when airliners run without fossil fuel?
Robin Mannings: Yes, there are possibilities for hydrogen power, although it is bulky to store currently, and there will likely be hybrid aircraft which harvest solar energy. There is also potential in energy recovery during descent.
But maybe it is also time for a more radical rethink. Cruise liners used to be popular for transatlantic trips, because the whole voyage was considered a pleasure. You could hardly say that about transatlantic flying: we’re constrained by the Concorde mentality of getting there as fast possible in a cramped tube burning thousands of tones of fuel in the process. But what if we used airships? Maybe there could be a return to a more spacious and leisurely approach to travel.
Businessgreen.com: And will it be algae-based fuels that take the place of fossils?
Charles Champion: That’s one solution, yes. Despite the success of solar aircraft trials, such as Solar Impulse, solar is highly unlikely to be the main propulsion for passenger airliners, although it will be useful as an add-on to power electrical controls and devices onboard.
We are looking to biomass fuels to replace fossils, as these can help to keep current fleets operational rather than require complete replacement. But it is important to ensure that biofuels do not compete with food crops for fertile land but can be grown in non-agricultural environments, such as deserts.
Businessgreen.com: You’ve referred to improving fuel efficiency by easing congestion through better ATM, with aircraft flying closer together. But what about the turbulence caused by ever greater sized aircraft like the A380?
Charles Champion: That’s a good point, but with the many hundreds of hours of testing we’ve done [on the A380] specifically to understand the vortex, we can see that the vortex flows down behind the aircraft, and doesn’t disturb any following aircraft, so we could fly in closer formation.
I said earlier we aim to halve fuel consumption over the next 20 years and about 10 per cent of that will be achieved through better ATM. If you look at the avionics used in military drones currently, that level of sophistication will quickly filter down to civilian aircraft, so we will use more computer sensors and controls with human overseers to maintain safety.
Businessgreen.com: While environmental factors will play a large part in shaping aircraft and airport design in the future, surely terrorism and the security needed to prevent it is the greatest inconvenience for passengers currently, not transport to/from airports or even the conditions onboard an airliner?
Charles Champion: This is true and so we are working with the security guys to manage security, privacy and convenience in a seamless manner. It is about getting al the stakeholders together.