Fish and Fuel from Sunlight, Sand, and Salt Water

Dean Sigler Biofuels, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Ethiad Airways made the first commercial flight on fuel made from plants grown in saltwater by Khalifa University.  Burning jet fuel made from halophyte plants grown in salt water and fertilized by the shrimp and fish living in the salt water enabled a flight from Abu Dhabi to Amsterdam on January 16.  It was the first flight on pure biofuels, even though commercial airlines have made over  160,000 flights on blended fuels since 2011. Dennis Bushnell Predicted This Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Dennis Bushnell shared information on halophytes, plants that grow in salt water.  He presented such ideas at a symposium your editor attended six years ago, and his vision is now being realized.  He points out that 70 percent of all water in the world has a high saline content and over 40 percent of all lands are arid and cannot sustain conventional agriculture. You can see a slide show of his presentation on halophytes here. An Encompassing …

Good News and a Bright Future from EAS IX

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, GFC, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Sitting next to your editor for the first day of CAFE’s ninth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium, Paul Bertorelli from AVweb, took copious notes, made sound recordings, and during coffee and lunch breaks and in after-hours sessions, interviewed the accomplished faculty at the Symposium.  His thorough and far-reaching reports appear in his last several days’ postings to AVweb.  Having stressed mightily while attempting to take understandable notes from each speaker’s talk, your editor can only be impressed by Paul’s super reportorial abilities, and his communicating the scope and importance of what took place at EAS IX. From your editor’s perspective, several significant things took place this year.  Senior leadership from Airbus and Siemens presented talks affirming their companies’ commitment to making progress in electric aviation, with future plans to develop two and four-seat aircraft for European and American markets from Airbus, and to produce a range of light-weight, commercially-available motors from Siemens. Siemens has 343,000 employees worldwide and revenues of 101.2 …