Flying Saucer Designed for Greener Air Travel

Eco-conscious travelers buy off their global warming guilt with carbon offsets that promote wind farms and reforestation.

Meanwhile, aviation engineers are taking another route, designing a more environmentally sustainable airplane that may overturn long-held notions of flight engineering.




"I want to get rid of the image of a cylindrical body with wings," said Etnel Straatsma of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

The plane of the future, in Straatsma's vision, might be as wild as a flying saucer. She and other engineers are toying with lighter materials and some are pondering ideas as radical as returning to propeller-driven planes as an eco-friendly alternative to passenger jets.

Straatsma heads the recently-formed CleanEra project, which aims to design an "ultra-eco-friendly plane" that releases 50 percent less carbon dioxide per passenger-mile than current airliners. The project's "greenliner"—depicted in design illustrations as a flying saucer—would also reduce other pollutants and noise, in line with recommendations from the European Aerospace Commission, ACARE.

The challenge is that modern airplanes are already close to maximally optimized, said Alexander de Haan, also from Delft but not involved with CleanEra. He has examined various design modifications and found that they could reduce carbon emissions and noise levels by, at most, 10 to 15 percent.

"These ideas cannot keep up with the 5 percent growth that the [airline] industry continues to have year after year," de Haan said.

Aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, but what has many worried is how fast the industry is growing. By 2050, air travel could be 5 percent or more of the total warming affect, according to a 1999 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Although estimates vary, flying in a plane releases the equivalent of about 1 pound of carbon dioxide per mile per passenger, which is about the same as driving a car the same distance.

Constant retooling of aircraft has helped to decrease emissions per passenger by 2 to 2.5 percent per year, said Andreas Hardeman of the industry group International Air Transport Association. But he agreed that the current paradigm may have reached the "end of the line."

"Ever since the Boeing 707 first flew in 1957, airliners ... have changed very little in their basic appearance," Hardeman said. "However, because future improvements to the basic design are getting harder to make, economic and environmental pressures mean that the case for radical change is getting stronger."

Radical change could mean introducing novel materials and shapes, or even reviving "old" propulsion systems.

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