Going green seems to be the rage these days and it was very recently that Virgin Airlines had announced that they are going to drop $1.4 billion on ultra fuel-efficient plane engines. Virgin’s reasoning behind this was that biofuel at the moment was still in its relative infant stages and that instead of waiting for biofuel to play catch up, they would rather invest in getting their fleet equipped with fuel-efficient engines instead.
Boeing on the other hand doesn’t seem to agree with their stance, instead they aim to be one of the first commercial jetliners to do a transatlantic flight on “biologically derived fuel”. The Boeing 747-8F will be piloted by Boeing’s Keith Otsuka and Rick Braun, along with Sten Rossby of Cargolux, who will be piloting the new plane to the Paris Air Show on Monday, using a 15 percent camelina-based biofuel mix with the remaining 85 percent of the fuel being the traditionally used Jet-A kerosene.
For those wondering, camelina is a plant that is grown in Montana and is processed by Honeywell subsidiary UOP and is a drop-in fuel which means that you will not have to make any changes or modifications to the engine or operating procedures, which probably ends up saving airline companies a lot of money should this fuel start getting adopted.
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