The future of aviation and the environment

highflyer wrote:

AFAIK there are still engines in our planes which do need fuel mixed with lead.

This has been discussed in detail in other threads. Lead itself is a means to an end – a high octane rating. The currently commercially available unleaded fuels do not have an octane rating sufficient for higher powered engines, so while covering a high %age of engines, they don’t cover as high a percentage of fuel consumed.

The obstacles to a higher-octane unleaded fuel at this point are mainly bureaucratic, not technical, and perhaps cost.

The main 100UL thread is here

Silvaire wrote:

inspected for corrosion and everything looks fine after 46 years in service with no overhaul.

I guess you live in a very very dry climate ? Evinrude solves this very elegantly. These engines are designed to be operated in salt water (nothing is worse than salt water regarding corrosion). Boating is also a seasoning thing, and the boat can often stay unused for several months. How to solve this regarding corrosion? They have this oil fogging system. At the push of a button, the whole engine (internals) is fogged in oil, and it can stay like that for months with no corrosion damage at all. At the first startup, it will make a lot of smoke when all this oil eventually burns Regarding maintenance, nothing is needed for the first 3 years or 300h. Nothing means nothing here.

Silvaire wrote:

The only thing that comes to mind is vastly advanced ignition timing to allow the ultra lean charge to burn.

I think what happens is that a combination of injection (angle, duration, pulses etc) and purposely designed air flow, you literally use only a small part of the combustion volume for combustion. Evinrude explains it like heating a room. You only need to heat one spot in the room, and the whole room gets heated. For full power, you heat the entire room at the same time. Essentially this is how a diesel engine work, only a diesel don’t need a spark, so the whole process is a million times simpler to actually make it work. For this stratified thing, the combustible pocket of fuel and air inside the larger room of clean air has to hit the spark plug at the right time regarding several parameters. It’s rather mind boggling it actually work.

But back to topic. This environmental thing is a bit more complex. From an engineering point of view, you would attack the problem the engineering way, and that is the 20/80 rule. You find the 20% of polluters that causes 80% of the total pollution. Fix those and the pollution is down by 80%. Then, do the same all over again using the 20/80 principle on the remaining 20% and so on. The thing is however, it’s not only an engineering problem. It’s a political and personal thing. It’s literally impossible to get the political will to do what it takes, the engineering way, without personal commitment by a whole bunch of voters. It’s too expensive, too far reaching. It involves things like scrapping all the cars, replacing them with electric cars. It involves shutting down all the thermal gas/oil powerplants, replacing them with clean energy( wind, hydro, sun) and thermonuclear plants. All this is on a scale way beyond what each individual can manage to do, but each individual (or a majority) must agree. One thing that makes people agree very easily is money. If electric cars get cheaper to own and operate, then bang, they will take over in an instance. They will indeed get cheaper, and they will take over within 5-10 years, but this hasn’t happened all by itself. It has taken decades of trial and error to get to the point we are today, simply to make enough people to believe in it. In Norway it has been done “artificially” by removing taxes and so on for electric cars. Today Norway is the largest market for Tesla and VW e-cars, but France has already taken over as the number one e-car in total, a couple of months ago I think. Powerplants are much more complicated, because the end user, each individual, has little influence. There is nothing to “purchase”.

The point is, this environmental thing is very much on a personal level. You cannot simply say that recreational GA is so small on “a larger scale”, that the effect is negligible. Everyone’s personal polluting effect is negligible, whether you take airlines every week, drive gas drinking monsters with V8s, use electricity produced by burning brown coal. It doesn’t matter. It’s the sum that counts. It doesn’t matter how you pollute, the environment doesn’t care. Either you pollute, or you don’t. It’s that simple. It’s way too many of us for each and everyone to say that my pollution doesn’t count.

If you want to pollute less, you have to take some actions. Take trains more often instead of car or airline. Install solar panels, get an electrical car. Fly a Diamond diesel, or a Rotax powered smaller plane instead of a gas guzzling, lead spewing Cessna with a Lycoming Or better still, get an electric airplane. Make it your “mission profile” to pollute as little while flying, instead of the usual “mission profile” that involves burning 40-60++ liters of fuel per hour, for hours and hours, just to get somewhere to eat a fish The politicians can make it easier for you to chose “right”, but that’s about it. In the end, every single person has to do what it takes. It is a personal choice, and if you feel a “social pressure” to pollute less, it most probably is because you pollute too much, or for slightly unacceptable or unnecessary reasons.

I have worked in the oil industry. I switched over to hydropower 15-20 years ago (clean and renewable), even though I make less money, fewer perks etc (well – did, the oil business is at a all time low for the last couple of years). It was a choice I made. I didn’t want to spend my entire life working with the single ting that are polluting the planet the most. I drive a small electric car, charged with clean renewable hydropower (+ some thermonuclear from Sweden and Finland every now and then ) It was all my choices, and I’m NOT in any way an environmentalists. I also puff around in a boat, I fly a 1950 Cub, tow gliders, using God knows how many liters of fuel, fly airline way too often, but I feel I have made up for all that in thousand folds working with hydropower instead of oil etc

Astrioorion wrote:

…one of my problems is that I would like to work for the clean tech industry and i found many interesting companies but don’t you think for instance if I say that my passion is aviation, love planes, i love to fly etc, how it is going to be perceived ( like a bit controversial )

I can perfectly well understand you. Occasionally there are chances to combine both: The love of flying and working for the “green” industry. For many years a company which researched and developed sites for wind energy generators had their two planes (an SEP and a PC12) at my home base. They needed the planes because their business was all over the country. Unfortunately they went bankrupt (nobody understands why) and the planes are gone – but flying for them would certainly have been good for one’s environmental conscience. For myself I decided at one point that I would switch from private to commercial flying, so at least my flying serves some kind of purpose. If I ever fly privately again (after retirement or losing the medical) it will almost certainly be gliding or microlighting, something that consumes no more fuel than driving a car.

LeSving wrote:

I have worked in the oil industry. I switched over to hydropower 15-20 years ago (clean and renewable), even though I make less money, fewer perks etc (well – did, the oil business is at a all time low for the last couple of years). It was a choice I made.

My choice was to produce less children, which is the best thing anybody can do to increase the standard of living for those remaining in an advanced society, which uses more resources per person but does not need as many people to function. You don’t often hear the environmental movement or government promoting discussion along those lines, in the service of environmentalism, do you? Follow the money and it’s easy to understand why, it’s as obvious as can be: more people = more tax revenue to spread across the ‘management staff’. Also because humans are programmed to procreate regardless and it’s not effective politics to preach in opposition to natural impulses, even when nature is wrong as it is in this instance. No different than any religious movement over thousands of years, notwithstanding that it’s a good idea for people to manage their individual lives responsibility, on every different level, including managing disposal of their individual waste.

A pilot friend of mine who is a research professor at a world renowned oceanographic institute holds the same view on the above as I do, and we do discuss it occasionally. His view is that nature finds its own balance and that given uncontrolled, exponential population growth over the past few hundred years, which in turn created unresolved environmental management challenges more recently, natural phenomena will in due course reduce human population regardless of human efforts to somehow accommodate more and more people paying more and more taxes. Think about it

How is “less children” the best thing one can do? Unless you actually weighed species extinction vs marginal additional damage your offspring will do to the planet, that statement is full of hot air, and having children (even “less”) remains an egoistical self-centered pursuit.

Astrioorion wrote:

Are you trying to say that human beings will decrease due to natural phenomenas but in the mean time human population will also adapt themselves to the evolution of our planet ?

No, I think he tries to say that nature will reduce the number of humans so that it can get back to it’s state of natural equilibrium. Whether or not the humans will have time to adapt remains to be seen. And honestly, I am disgusted that an American “research professor of oceanography” is quoted as anectdotical evidence to prove the point. I hope that the majority of American scholars have a different view about this, just like everywhere else. “Après nous le déluge” is probably the most easy-going way of life but not mine.

“Change the world, start with yourself”.

The easy way out is to look at ‘the others’. It becomes interesting and effective if you look at yourself.

Rather than living like a monk for the sake of the globe, I think we have the right to live our dreams, but at the same time try to create a reasonable balance. Let’s face it, the amount of fuel that many of us here use, accounts for (a lot) more than the heating of just one house. So what’s wrong by including a category called ‘compensation’ to your flying budget? Plenty of ways to do that.

It works on a small scale and on a big scale. My scale is not that big, flying this frugal twin I made my sums and me and my wife (I asked her to help me compensate my bit ) are not doing badly, driving electric cars. Yes, charged by our own solar panels, and even trying to plan our driving in such a way that we can make use of the sun as much as possible.

On a bigger scale it becomes harder but not impossible. A very close friend flies an aircraft at the very upper end of the pecking order. You don’t want to know how many trees he calculated that he needed to have planted. And he did!!