It is called Green Airlines and is the new private jet airline that will start operating from October in Germany. It promises to be less polluting and to recycle all the material accumulated on board the aircraft. Despite good intentions, Green Airlines continues to fuel its ATR-72 with traditional fossil fuel.
CO2 emissions collapse with the pandemic
It is not easy for the civil aviation sector to get rid of harmful emissions from aircraft in flight. Before the pandemic, the air transport sector accounted for 2.4% of the total CO2, a value that was significantly reduced during the pandemic as there were no airplanes in flight for many months: according to Eurocontrol’s calculations, between April and July in 2020 air traffic decreased by 77.2% compared to the same period in 2019 as a result of the restrictions on air traffic in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the same period CO2 emissions fell by 77.7 percent.
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The Green Deal defined by the European Commission sets a very stringent road map with the aim of achieving Zero Emissions by 2050, a target doubled from the previous one which was 50 percent. The industry doesn’t have much time to make its planes less polluting. But the conversion will cost billions of dollars for an industry that is slowly emerging from the Covid crisis, the worst in its history. In some European countries they have proposed a tax to be paid by carriers on greenhouse gas pollution and in France they want to ban flights to destinations that can be reached by train in three hours.
Electric aircraft, synthetic fuel and biofuel for green flight
Electric planes, hybrids, hydrogen engines, low-emission fuel are just some of the solutions that are being evaluated, but so far the right mix between energy efficiency and low costs has not been found. This is the case of electric aircraft: totally free of harmful emissions, this solution presents the problem of storing batteries that are still too heavy to be transported on board the aircraft and the prototypes currently in circulation can carry 4-5 passengers at most.
An alternative solution to fossil fuel for medium and long haul flights does not currently exist. Simulations are being carried out with biofuel produced from plant extracts, domestic waste, used oils, sugar cane, but in addition to subtracting land from the cultivation of food products, it is not clear what the savings in the use of biofuel are. The cost almost double compared to fossil fuel is one of the barriers to its introduction in a sector still in full crisis.