climate change A Plane Powered By Cooking Oil Just Finished Another Test Flight There’s another use for cooking oil and other byproducts from forestry and farming: powering jets. Airbus wants all its planes running on sustainable jet fuel by the end of the decade, and the fuel is much better for the environment than kerosene, says Amanda Simpson, vice president of research and technology at Airbus Americas.
air travel Fighting Climate Change While Flying NBCLX storyteller Clark Fouraker had the opportunity to ride on the first commercial flight with passengers to use 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for one of the aircraft’s two engines.
air travel Making Air Travel Carbon Neutral Means Rethinking the Way We Fly Airlines emit the same amount of carbon as the German and Dutch economies combined. But it will take more than just making the world’s airline fleets more fuel efficient to reverse the industry’s impact on climate change. NBCLX storyteller Clark Fouraker takes a look at how industry innovators are hoping to make air travel greener and more efficient — and...
air pollution After 9/11, This Scientist Got to Study an Empty Sky While the events of Sept. 11, 2001 were a tragedy, they also offered a rare opportunity to researchers – a chance to observe an empty sky. Because all flights were grounded for days after the attacks, former NASA atmospheric scientist Patrick Minnis documented how the sky changed without the presence of airplane vapor trails – one of the airline industry’s...
September 11 Attacks Flimsy Cockpit Doors and Pocketknives: A Look at Air Travel Before 9/11 The Sept. 11 terror attacks changed a lot about the way we live in America — but nowhere are those changes more apparent than in air travel. The creation of the Transportation Security Administration put airport security under government control for the first time, and lax security and flimsy cockpit doors became a thing of the past. NBCLX storyteller Cody Broadway explains.