United Airlines, fourth largest at HIA, “to lead industry switch to sustainable aviation fuels” – ABC 27 Harrisburg
How did I get connected with a local news station in Harrisburg, you ask? Well just look at that byline. Seth Kaplan from Airline Weekly fame has gone back to his roots in local news, and he asked me for comment on United’s latest sustainable fuel program.
United is partnering with ten big companies to try to push sustainable fuels. I look at this and see just one of several efforts by the airline to move toward reducing the airline’s carbon impact. It has invested in electric aviation, and it has committed to investing in carbon recapture. This is an airline that is trying, albeit one that is hamstrung by technological issues.
So when I see the quote in the article from an academic saying, “All they’re doing is continuing to kill people with their pollution and continuing to kill people with global warming. What they really need to do is go to electricity and hydrogen fuel cells for all their aircraft. They’re not the aircraft builder, but they can encourage it,” it just makes me angry.
2 comments on “Cranky on the Web: United’s Latest Sustainable Effort”
The people that talk about just using batteries for planes make me laugh. As somebody that has seen the size of the battery powered personal transport copters and knows with current sizes it would take something 747 size to have the capacity of the upper deck.
The media have a tendency to focus mainly on the extremes. That’s why the “news” usually doesn’t paint an accurate picture of what’s happening. In my opinion, political thought, like most things statistical, tends to follow a bell curve. About 10% of the population tend to be extreme one way, and a like number skew to the opposite extreme. The other 80%, representing a vast spectrum of thought between the extremes, is largely ignored.