The aviation sector has become interested in sustainable mobility and is promising the development of various innovative projects in favour of the environment over the coming years. On the agenda: new energies and an emission calculator.
Moreover, the Chinese start-up Yuneec has made some noise, by showing
clips of the E430 plane in flight,
the first fully electric plane. The benefits of this two-seater, with its flying time of 2h30, are not only that it’s silent and 100% clean, but also that it only costs $2 per hour of flight.
Available on the market by 2011, it will sell for around €70,000.
Test flights for "clean" planes
The test flights for the E430, which started in June 2009 in China, were continued last year in California with the American pilot, Dave Morss, who showed the ULM at the Oshkosh Air Venture convention.
As for the Solar Impulse, the Swiss solar-powered plane, it completed its first flight in December 2009: a 400-metre hop over the Dübendorf Airfield runway.
Awarded by the Association of Professional Aeronautics and Space Journalists (AJPAE), this solar-powered plane, designed by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, a Swiss ex-fighter pilot, has a 63-metre wingspan and is 22 metres long. It is fitted with
11,600 photovoltaic cells to capture solar energy. We’ll have to wait until 2012 to witness its next flight, a round-the-world flight in a month in five stages, powered 100% by solar energy.
However, the 100% clean principle must also be applied to
citizens’ air mobility. It’s with this aim that the French Civil Aviation Authority, in partnership with the French Ministry for Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea, is launching the
eco-calculator.
Developed by the Technical Inter-professional Centre for Atmospheric Pollution Studies (CITEPA), this tool calculates the CO2 emissions produced per passenger, according to his/her destinations and real distances travelled.
It’s enough to let sustainable development spread its wings.
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