Heathrow airport has been working on their latest initiative designed to cut emissions at the same time as improving the comfort and convenience at the airport. This initiative comes in the form of the Urban Light Transport (ULTra) – “a personal rapid transit” system in the form of driverless, electrically-powered "taxi pods" which transport people and their luggage to Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. The ULTra taxi pods run on their own infrastructure, similar to that of a monorail system and have impressive environmental credentials, offering low emissions, a high level of service, efficient use of space and good value for money. But they do not only sound like something from the future, they actually look like something from a science fiction film. The idea being, to a certain extent, that if the ULTra is going to be around for years to come, its design will have to withstand the test of time!!

Elsewhere at Swansea University scientists have been researching into the aviation fuel of the future – microalgae. These scientists are undertaking a project using algae to create oil from seaweed, and have found that one particular type of algae, a microalgae named Botryococcus braunii algae, can produce particularly high levels of oil – around 50 to 140 tonnes of oil per hectare, compared to biofuel ethanol, which produces about 0.2 tonnes of oil equivalent, and rapeseed which generates around 1.2 tonnes. They are hoping that with their developments, the commercialization of biofuel across Wales will pick-up, especially as businesses become increasingly aware of the problems of relying on our resources of fossil fuels which are rapidly running-out and are known to contribute substantially to global warming.

And finally, to the air traffic management of the future… at ATC Global in Amsterdam on Wednesday, the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) presented results from the European flight demonstrations performed in the framework of the Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions (AIRE). The AIRE project looked at inexpensive ways in which airlines, airports and aviation regulators in the U.S. and Europe can cut fuel consumption, carbon emissions and flight times by cooperating more effectively on air traffic management. Whilst undertaking this project, which was designed essentially to test the feasibility of implementing such procedures, engineers were also able to measure concrete fuel and CO2 savings from these procedures. And the results…? Pretty promising! The improvements show savings of more than 400 tons of CO2 on the test flights, which is about the equivalent of the annual CO2 emission of 100 passenger cars!