The European Union launched last week the Clean Sky Joint Technology Initiative when more than 500 participants attended the Forum on February 5th in Brussels. The objective of the programme is to offer Europe an ecological and sustainable perspective for air transport, boosting research that will provide greener products and systems.
And how does that translate into action? So far, nine leading aeronautics companies – AgustaWestland, Airbus, Alenia Aeronautica, Dassault Aviation, Eurocopter, Liebherr-Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, SAFRAN, and Thales – have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that established the initiative. The promise is to “radically improve the impact of air transport on the environment through technologies and solutions enabling step changes in the reduction of noise, emissions, and fuel consumption for future aircraft.” How that’s going to be achieved is never quite explained.
It sounds very praiseworthy and diplomatic in that Brussels sort of way, but in the case of Europe, rail travel could be the means of transportation of choice. People fly everywhere across the old continent because rail tickets have become more expensive than flying, because Europeans like to take holidays abroad several times a year and it rarely takes more two hours to get anywhere. But trains are potentially a cleaner form of transportation if you make sure they are full by giving people the incentive to choose rail over air or the road. Besides, with global aircraft fleet expected to double by 2020, any reductions in carbon emissions per flight will be canceled out by volume.
Here I’d like to point you to this blog entry by No Impact Man in which he says: “The thing is, we’re looking for the better automobile, but couldn’t we do much better for ourselves by finding ways not to have to spend so much time in them in the first place?”. Absolutely – and the same principle should apply to airplanes as well.
