First, I want to give an example of what journalism should be. It came from, of all places, a television critic for the Orlando Sentinel, Mr. Hal Boedeker. I would recommend that you read the article first, which you'll find here.
What I found astounding and wonderful about this piece is that Mr. Boedeker a) presented both sides of the discussion coherently, b) presented FACTS from both sides, including relevant examples where possible, and c) did not allow me to ascertain his personal feelings about what he was writing and presenting. He doesn't necessarily defend the WFTV anchorperson in question, nor does he attack her. Remember, critics are paid to provide their opinion; for a piece of wonderfully-objective journalism like this to come from a critic is the ironic icing on the cake. His editor deserves as much congratulations both for running this piece as well as for keeping Mr. Boedeker on staff.
In a world where we expect bias in our reporting, it is a sad commentary on the industry that objective journalism examples such as this one are the exception, not the rule, so much that I would comment on it and even thank the author for it. If you haven't already, you might send along an e-mail letting him know if you like it.
With all the talk about the environment and all the thinking on solutions, one concern that hasn't been mentioned much is going to come up big over the next few years. That concern is clean commercial aviation. Fortunately, there are people thinking about this problem. What no one mentions about the issue is how to tackle it rationally. It's easy to make cars more friendly to the environment; they carry less and all they have to do is turn two wheels to make the car go. Internal-combustion engines are easily replaced (relatively) with electric motors. But how do you replace a jet engine? By design and function, a jet engine requires the explosion only fuel can generate. Unfortunately, nothing yet devised explodes better, and thus provides thrust better, than jet fuel, which is horribly "dirty". So until someone designs a "clean" jet engine, we're stuck with them, or we'll be going back to propeller-driven planes, which are driven by internal-combustion engines (which, again, are easily replaced by electric motors). So we're already going to lose speed because prop planes are always slower than jets.
But how to design an eco-friendly prop plane? Planes can't use any method, like cars can, to "coast" and use that kinetic energy to recharge the batteries. For example, adding any free-spinning props to spin in the airstream, say on the back of the wings or at the end of the fuselage, for this purpose will increase drag and thus increase power needed to maintain flight. So an electric prop plane would probably need a lot more batteries. No problem. But batteries are heavy. Weight, like drag, is a killer of flight of any kind. Just as God gave birds hollow bones to conserve weight and make flight easier, aeronautical engineers look for as many ways as possible to conserve weight in their designs. Batteries would effectively negate those designs, because the power-to-weight ratio of today's batteries is pathetic. Add in the fact that more motors would be needed for a large commercial-sized plane than for a car, and that commercial-sized planes need longer runtime than batteries that can't be recharged en route (like an electric car's can), and that "refueling" (i.e., recharging all of those batteries) would take longer than traditional refueling would, and you've got a loser. So we're losing power, we're losing speed, and we're adding weight, further reducing speed, and this is progress? Why don't we just put the airlines out of business right now?
So traditional electric-car-type designs are a loser. How about nuclear, like the above-linked article talks about? Smallish reactors are already a proven technology, since the Navy's been using them for decades. Nuclear might work pretty well operationally; we're still running propellers, but no refueling would ever be required, just routine powerplant checks, so that would save time between most flights. It would save a lot of weight compared to batteries, though it might be prudent to have a small bank of them, along with emergency coolant tanks (similar to a nuclear sub's emergency venting of the reactor to the sea), as a last-resort failsafe against meltdown. Then there's shielding; all that lead is mighty heavy. So weight is still tricky, but compared to a full fuel load, it might be workable. Workability aside, though, why chance a minor Chernobyl every time a plane goes down? Air travel is still the safest way to travel, statistically, but planes do crash. Crashing even a small nuclear powerplant, unless it's fusion-powered, is just too risky a proposition for me, even if we could make the power and weight right. So I don't think nukes are the answer (for this scenario, anyway).
My bet would be on either fuel cells of some type (which probably means we're still running on much slower propeller-based aircraft), or on some new, revolutionary, as-yet-undeveloped technology . In any case, clean-running airplanes are a pipe dream, at least for the next 20-30 years.
It's been a while since I've seen a less noteworthy World Series than we have today. Philadelphia Phillies vs. Tampa Bay Devil Rays? Yawn...at least the playoff races were pretty good this year.
Thanks for reading along today.
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