Things are hotting up here in Copenhagen. After the country representatives spent all last week working on the text dealing with aviation, suddenly yesterday the President of the COP – who chairs the proceedings – announced that she was splitting these workstreams into even smaller groups and making the sessions closed to observers. It is [...]

“You’re next holiday may be powered by weeds” wrote Dominic O’Connell in the Sunday Times this week and indeed he may be right… Last week we saw a passenger biofuel flight by KLM and the last in a series of ‘MINT’ flights; this week sees development through British Airways who have taken a big step [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]