An interesting piece of news in the New York Times yesterday about Sapphire Energy, the supplier of algae-based biojet to the recent flight trials by Japan Airlines and Continental Airlines. Sapphire says that it has revised its forecast on the amount of fuel that it will be producing from algae. By 2011, it will produce [...]

The biofuel test flight on a Continental Airlines 737-800 went better than expected – The pilots reported that the biofuel blend in their number two engine had no discernable performance difference than the normal jet fuel used in their number one engine. But when they got on the ground, they revealed that they actually used [...]

The Continental Airlines biofuel flight (designated flight number CO9990) has now landed back at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. As you can see from the flight path it took above, it spent most of the test over the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, climbing to 38,000 feet where it performed a series of [...]

Well, the flight has been in the air for around an hour now and the two pilots and one engineer on board will be undertaking a series of tests to demonstrate how the biofuel performs in the CFM engines. The two-engined aircraft has one engine being flown on regular Jet-A1 fuel and the other engine [...]

Within the next few minutes, a Boeing 737-800 aircraft will take off from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport on an historical mission. It is the first test flight in a commercial jet to utilise algae as a biofuel source. Like last week’s Air New Zealand flight, this will test the second-generation biofuel’s ability to withstand [...]

The month from 30 December to 30 January will see the aviation industry conduct three different flight trials where traditional jet fuel will be replaced with biofuels. Biofuels are fuels made from plants or algae and they need plenty of CO2 to grow, thus making it possible for the aviation industry to achieve carbon neutrality [...]

A few stories of note today – Continental Airlines has announced the date for its biofuel test flight. Following on from the Virgin flight using coconut and babassu oil earlier this year and ahead of the postponed Air New Zealand flight on a jatropha oil mix, Continental will fly a Boeing 737-800 on a 50/50 [...]

The race to the White House is not the only race making news at the moment. Last week, I wrote about some of the work being done on a new type of very efficient aircraft engine by Rolls-Royce. Well, it seems that GE Aviation have teamed up with NASA to run similar tests, according to [...]

It is interesting to reflect on the past couple of years in the aviation industry. When I first became involved in aviation at a global level in 2006, no one really believed biofuels would make much of an impact. In fact, there were those who thought biofuels were an impossible sell to aviation, considering the [...]