For the first time yesterday, an Airbus A320 flew on biofuel – its energy supplied by 50% biofuel from the jatropha plant and 50% normal Jet A1 fuel. Importantly, the test flight took place in Brazil, using Brazilian-grown jatropha and with Brazil’s national carrier TAM Airlines. It was the first such test flight to take [...]

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 [...]

The Air New Zealand biofuel test flight went very well, by all accounts. The Jatropha-derived fuel performed as well as the normal Jet-A1 fuel in the other three engines of the Boeing 747-400. There will now be some further on-the-ground tests to be completed in Auckland before the second-generation biofuel is taken for even more [...]

The pre-flight briefing has just taken place at Auckland Airport, with Captain Dave Morgan going through some of the key stages of the test flight. One interesting point he made was that the Boeing 747-400 being used for today’s test has had to be taken off the New Zealand aircraft registry and re-classified an ‘experimental’ [...]

It is around an hour and a half until the Air New Zealand 747-400 takes off from the main runway at Auckland Airport on a flight powered, in part, by the oil from the plant Jatropha. So what exactly is Jatropha? Well, Jatropha is actually a species of around 175 types of plants, shrubs and [...]

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 [...]

While the aviation industry concentrates on blended, sustainable, biofuels as the energy source of the future, blog The Airport Channel outlines a research project based on powering aircraft with a nuclear source. It is an… interesting… notion, but I shan’t pass judgment just yet. One benefit (apart from zero carbon emissions) would be that fuel [...]

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 [...]