Green planes, will they ever take the skies ?
The answer is complicated. As you may know, Aircraft are one of the leading contributors to fossil fuels. Just imagine the thousands of jets, flying for hours, polluting the deep blue sky
This has provoked many aerospace engineers to create an aircraft with zero fossil fuel emissions, green electric, and hydrogen engines being the type that scientists are looking forward to.
I'm a huge aviation enthusiast and would love to see airplanes and nature, working together in harmony, rather than one harming the other. Let’s look into some future and current projects
Our first example would be the Airbus Zero E Hydrogen powered aircraft. The famous Aerospace company Airbus is looking at creating three airplanes, each hydrogen-powered. The first aircraft is similar to the ATR-72. It is powered by two turbo propeller engines, It can hold up to one hundred and fifty passengers, and the range is around one thousand nautical miles. The second design is very unconventional, as the aircraft is shaped like a triangle, and uses a blended wing design, a new technology, only used in drones ever before. The thrust is created by eight small turbofan jets. This is double the size of the first design, holding up to Two hundred and fifty passengers. The distance it is able to safely fly is Two thousand nautical miles. The third and final diagram shows a regional jet, turbofan-powered, which is very close in design to the Airbus-Bombardier A220. It has the same range and capacity of the blended wing above. These planes are targeted to first take flight by 2030! To help with this project, Airbus has electrically powered a much, much smaller aerobatic aircraft, to learn from.
NASA ( The USA’s leading aerospace company) has also joined the game. They have made UAV( Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that are fully run by solar panels. The name of that project was called Helios. Soon, NASA will be flight testing the X57 Maxwell, which is a multi engine demonstration aircraft, which will test the endurance of green aircraft. It uses two Lithium Ion batteries to power its 15 electric motors. 13 of the motors are small, taking up most of the wing, and the other two are big rotors that do most of the work to push the plane off the ground. The full capacity of the aircraft equals only two people. The first flight of the Maxwell will take place in a few months, much closer than the ZEROe.
A Slovenian company, Pipstrel, has already started manufacturing and selling electric aircraft, which is named the Pipistrel Velis Electro. The Velis is an ultralight training aircraft that has been type certified. It uses a liquid-cooled lithium battery as a power plant and consumes a very low amount of energy. The Danish and Slovenian militaries have loaned some aircraft to work and learn how to build their own environmentally friendly aircraft.
It is clear that we have already made great strides in creating aircraft with zero fossil fuel emissions. There are many innovative projects, like the Airbus Zero E Hydrogen powered aircraft, NASA's Helios UAVs, and the Pipistrel Velis Electro ultralight training aircraft, which all demonstrate how close we are to achieving this goal. In addition to these current projects, aerospace engineers are working on larger designs such as the ATR-72 and blended wing designs. With continued research and development of green electric and hydrogen engines for airplanes, I believe that it is realistic to assume that electric aircraft will become the norm by 2050. However, due to the complexity of such a feat it will require collective effort from governments, militaries and private companies alike in order to make this dream a reality.
Thank you for reading my blog
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