Green fuels still faces problems
The alternative aviation fuel industry continues to conduct flight tests to validate the use of new jet-fuel blends. At the end of April, United Airlines became the first U.S. commercial carrier to fly using a certified synthetic-fuel blend that received ASTM approval last year.
The 40/60 mix powered one of the engines on an Airbus A319 in an engineering validation flight that departed Denver International Airport and reached an altitude of 39,000 feet. The drop-in fuel, supplied by Los Angeles-based producer Rentech, was derived from natural gas and converted to liquid through the Fischer-Tropsch process.
“This flight confirms our assumptions about how this fuel performs on a commercial aircraft in a variety of situations and represents the next step in our effort to stimulate competition in the aviation fuel supply chain, promote energy security through economically viable alternatives that also demonstrate environmental benefits and contribute to the creation of green jobs,” said Joseph Kolshak, United Airlines senior vice president of operations.
That test flight followed one by the U.S. Navy, which for the first time operated one of its fighters on a biofuel blend. On Earth Day (April 22) an F/A-18 dubbed the Green Hornet took to the skies over the Navy’s flight-test center in Patuxent River, Md., powered by a 50/50 mix of camelina-derived biofuel supplied by Honeywell subsidiary UOP, which has developed the technology for the fuel under a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to help satisfy the service’s stated goal of meeting half its energy needs with alternative fuels by 2020. UOP also supplied the fuel for the June test flight of a Royal Netherlands Air Force Boeing AH-64D Apache, the first use of sustainable aviation biofuels by a helicopter. In this case a blend derived from algae and used cooking oil powered one of the Apache’s engines, which required no modification for the demonstration.
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