A month or two ago, the anti-aviation activists at Plane Stupid staged a protest around the 25th birthday of Virgin Atlantic where they teamed up with anti-biofuel protesters and said that the aviation sector was ‘joking’ if it thought that biofuels could help reduce emissions. While their little protest was fun and it is always amusing to see guys dressed up as female flight attendants, the reasoning behind their objections is, well, flawed.

They cite that the 2008 biofuel test flight that Virgin Atlantic carried out between London and Amsterdam "contained just 5% coconut oil, yet the journey still required 150,000 coconuts for a one-way flight from London to Amsterdam. Yep, that’s 150,000 thousand coconuts. To cover just 5% of one flight. Across the Channel. To put it into perspective, that’s enough coconuts to make 300,000 pina coladas." As tempting as working your way through 300,000 pina coladas might sound, no-one in the industry has any intention of flying aircraft on coconut oil.

That test flight was just that… a test. To see if a flight on biofuel could be done and demonstrate what could be achieved to a) the rest of the aviation industry, b) governments, c) potential suppliers and d) research institutions. It’s not for nothing that since that test flight, we have seen an explosion in the research on other, truly sustainable sources of aviation biofuel such as algae.

As is often the case, these protest groups have failed to distinguish between first and second generation sources of biofuel. So, we have decided to help them out. Knowing about their lack of attention to detail, we have tried to make it as simple as possible on our new mini-website www.flyonbiofuels.org. This clearly describes some of the key differences between first generation and second generation biofuels and shows why we in the aviation industry are keen to explore the latter group and keep the coconuts for the pina coladas.