Planes Have to Get More Efficient. Here's How to Do It

Airlines and plane makers are already obsessed with cutting fuel, but they'll have to do more.

The EPA wants to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions of commercial aircraft. It's no surprise: Europe already has standards in place, and the EPA has adopted increasingly stringent emissions rules for passenger cars, trucks, trains, and power plants. Aviation is a dirty business, responsible for 1.5 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

This is only the beginning of the process. The EPA has issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, a heads up that it's cooking up some rules and anyone with an opinion should speak up pronto.

What's interesting here, though, is the aircraft manufacturers and airlines are taking it upon themselves to reduce emissions---by cutting fuel consumption. They're obsessed with fuel efficiency, because fuel is their biggest single expense---33 percent of operating costs. That's off the charts in an industry where profit margins are tighter than elbow room on a Spirit Airlines flight.

This explains why you're being shoved into thinner and lighter seats (which also provide more room, which lets airlines cram more people aboard). Airlines are shelling out for new, lightweight food carts. Pilots are carrying tablets instead of piles of paper manuals. Ryanair puts less ice in passengers' drinks than it used to, and made its magazines physically smaller. Samoa Air charges passengers by weight---seriously.

Beyond cutting weight everywhere possible, airlines are eager to make the planes they already have more efficient. This is key: Planes stay in service for two or three decades, so the ability to adopt the latest tech and cut fuel consumption is key. That's why Boeing and Airbus offer performance improvement packages to boost fuel efficiency. This often means adding aerodynamic devices to wingtips (Boeing calls them winglets, Airbus calls them sharklets), which can cut fuel use by up to 5 percent on single-aisle jets.

Still, if the strict standards that have hit the auto industry are a guide, these changes are the equivalent of snipping off loose threads when the entire sweater needs to go. Or at least the sleeves. "A little bit here and there certainly does matter," says Scott Hamilton, managing director of aerospace consulting firm Leeham Company. But for dramatic changes, he says, you need some more serious changes.

Those fall into two basic categories: Rethinking how we power planes, and rethinking how we design them.

Ditching Kerosene

Yes, there's a solar-powered plane currently circumnavigating the planet. And yes, electricity probably could power small two-seat aircraft in the near future. And yes, the push for alt fuel even includes hydrogen fuel cells. But fossil fuels are not going away anytime soon. Commercial aircraft weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds and fly thousands of miles at hundreds of miles per hour. We're nowhere near being able to do that with electricity, even if one entrepreneur is working on mid-air recharging for electric airplanes.

That's why the industry hypes up biofuels, which work just like fossil fuels but are made from renewable sources like algae, wood, agricultural waste, and certain plants. Everyone---including the US Air Force, even if the Navy hasn't quite gotten it right and Congress got involved---likes them because they're a drop-in replacement for conventional fuel; they play nice with current engines and have can reduce an airplane's carbon footprint by up to 80 percent, according to the Air Transport Action Group. If the commercial aviation industry could use 6 percent biofuel, it could cut its total footprint by 5 percent.

But they're barely used. Since biofuels were approved for use, Boeing says, they've powered more than 1,600 commercial flights (mixed with standard fuel). That's minuscule when you remember airlines operate 30,000 flights a day in US airspace alone.

Trouble is, biofuels are a relatively new idea. The infrastructure for producing and distributing them in quantities sufficient to make a dent in emissions simply isn't there yet, Hamilton says. So they're available in limited supply. And they're expensive. Which means today, there's no financial upside to burning gas made from algae instead of dinosaurs, even if it is better for the planet.


Things are moving along: Boeing has development projects on six continents, including a tobacco plant in South Africa. EPA standards could help this development along, especially if the feds cough up subsidies for building the needed processing plants and transportation systems.

A New Kind of Airplane

If we can make planes already in service more efficient, why not just make new ones as good as possible? That's happening, to a large extent: The recently released (in aviation industry terms) Boeing 787 Dreamliner and forthcoming Airbus A350 are vastly more efficient than previous generation aircraft. They're made almost entirely from composite materials instead of metal, so they're ballerina-light.

Engines across the line have gotten better: The unit on the new Boeing 737 Max is twice as efficient as the one on the 737 New Generation introduced in 1998. But they could get even better: Open rotor engines, which resemble turboprops, have been proven to deliver dramatic increases in fuel efficiency. The challenge is making the maintenance and cost reasonable, and ensuring the blades never snap off and death-slice their way into the cabin.

The problem is that building a truly new airplane, one designed from a clean sheet of paper, takes at least a decade and tens of billions of dollars. And once you plunk down that time and money, you stick with it. Boeing introduced the first 737 and 747 jets in the late 1960s, it's still making them.

The good news is that the planemakers are definitely thinking about the next generation of commercial carriers. Take for example Airbus' latest concept plane, the inspirationally named "Airbus Concept Plane." Some of the ideas it proposes are far-fetched, like playing golf and tennis on board (which is just silly, because in the future we'll all just watch rollerball on our virtual reality headsets).

But other elements of the concept---a fuselage shaped for better aerodynamics, a U-shaped tail to limit noise, longer and slimmer wings---are all feasible.

Moving them from the drawing board into the sky is doable, but will take time and money. And if the feds have anything to do with it, they may be able to hurry up a bit.