LONDON (AP) — The first commercial airliner to cross the Atlantic on purely high-fat, low-emissions fuel flew from London to New York on Tuesday, a step toward achieving what proponents call “Jet Zero.” flew.
Virgin Atlantic’s Boeing 787 flight was powered without fossil fuels, relying instead on so-called sustainable aviation fuel, which consists primarily of tallow and other waste fats.
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Virgin founder Richard Branson, who was on the plane with business and government officials, engineers and journalists, said: “The world will always think you can’t do something until you do it.” ” he said.
Britain’s Department for Transport, which provided £1 million ($1.27 million) to plan and operate the flight, said the trial could make air travel more environmentally friendly, although major hurdles remain to making the fuel widely available. This is a “huge step toward zero jets,” he said. .
Virgin Atlantic has completed the first-ever transatlantic commercial flight using high-fat fuel touted as sustainable.
Governments have long talked about decarbonizing air travel, but the transition is moving at a dirigible pace.
The US Department of Energy has said that sustainable aviation fuels, which reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 70%, are the best near-term path for the international aviation industry to reach net-zero targets by 2050. , says this goal is ambitious.
The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that domestic production of the fuel has jumped from about 2 million gallons in 2016 to 15.8 million gallons in 2022, but it accounts for 0.1% of the jet fuel used by major U.S. airlines. It was announced that it was less than This was a drop in the bucket compared to the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual production goal of 1 billion gallons set in 2018.
Meanwhile, two years ago, the White House set a goal of producing 3 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel a year by 2030 and producing 100% of domestic commercial jet fuel by 2050.
The UK has set a target for 10% of its jet fuel to come from sustainable sources by 2030.
Holly Boyd-Boland, Virgin Atlantic’s vice president of corporate development, said the flight showed the fuel could power existing aircraft, but the challenge was to “develop more sustainable aviation.” “It’s about increasing production to make sure we have enough fuel to fly every day.” Day. “
However, the Aviation Environment Federation said the aviation industry was making misleading claims about the impact of sustainable fuels on carbon emissions.
Policy director Kate Hewitt said: “The idea that this flight will somehow bring us closer to guilt-free flying is a joke.” Sustainable aviation fuel “represents about 0.1% of the world’s aviation fuel and is very difficult to scale up sustainably.”
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It was the first jetliner to make a transatlantic journey using only sustainable fuel, but it was not a commercial flight, nor was it the first jetliner to do so.
Earlier this month, Gulfstream Aerospace completed the first crossing in a business jet powered entirely by eco-fuels. Two years ago, Air France-KLM flew from Paris to Montreal using a mixture of petroleum-based jet fuel and synthetic fuel made from used cooking oil.
