Prof. Nancy Rose speaks with NPR’s Planet Money hosts Erika Beras and Kenny Malone about the impact of airline deregulation and the aircraft industry. “We need these kind of smaller carriers who want to grow, who want to go in and take share from the majors because they're the ones that are keeping the price pressure on,” says Rose.
Prof. John Sterman speaks with New York Times reporter Susan Shain about the effectiveness of flight offsets. Sterman explains that few offset project results are verifiable, immediate and durable, part of his criteria for legitimacy. Better recommendations include insulating your home or buying an electric car.
MIT researchers are working to uncover new ways to avoid contrails and minimize their impact on global warming, reports Nicolas Rivero for The Washington Post. “Whether [the contrail impact is] exactly 20 percent or 30 percent or 50 percent, I don’t think anybody knows that answer, really,” says research scientist Florian Allroggen “But it also doesn’t really matter. It’s a big contributor and we need to worry about it.”
Alexander Bratianu-Badea SM '15 co-founded De-Ice, a startup creating a new and efficient way to thaw aircrafts, reports Kate Duffy for Bloomberg. Bratianu-Badea says, “De-Ice’s strips stick onto the plane with aerospace-grade, acrylic-based adhesive backing. During regulatory tests, the system was exposed to different temperatures, humidifies and chemicals. Even UV light and submersion in a heated oil bath couldn’t damage it.”
Postdoctoral associate Milan Klöwer shares how large conferences can impact air travel and personal carbon footprints, reports Sydney Johnson for KQED. “Flying is one of the sectors where there are enormous inequalities,” says Klöwer. “The people that earn the most [money] fly the most, and therefore have personal carbon footprints that are thousands of times larger than the poorest people on the planet. There is a responsibility for people to understand that problem about how they are personally emitting.”
MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a new air safety system, called Air-Guardian, that is designed to serve as a “proactive co-pilot, enhancing safety during critical moments of flight,” reports Jace Dela Cruz for Tech Times.
MIT researchers have developed a new compact, lightweight design for a 1-megawatt electrical motor that “could open the door to electrifying much larger aircraft,” reports Ed Gent for IEEE Spectrum. “The majority of CO2 is produced by twin and single-aisle aircraft which require large amounts of power and onboard energy, thus megawatt-class electrical machines are needed to power commercial airliners,” says Prof. Zoltán Spakovszky. “Realizing such machines at 1 MW is a key stepping stone to larger machines and power levels.”
As part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, researchers at MIT are developing “nearly silent electroaerodynamic thrusters that would be used for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, for both passengers and cargo,” reports Passant Rabie for Gizmodo.
Prof. Steven Barrett speaks with New York Times reporter Paige McClanahan about the pressing need to make air travel more sustainable and his research exploring the impact of contrails on the planet’s temperature. “Eliminating contrails is quite a big lever on mitigating the climate impact of aviation,” said Barrett.
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, highlights the safety concerns associated with shrinking airlines seats. “Tightening seating is argued to be a threat to a speedy emergency evacuation and even the cause of dangerous health conditions such as blood clots,” writes Coughlin.
MIT and Delta airlines are developing a plan to eliminate persistent contrails, reports Susan Tran for NBC Boston 10. “A possible solution here is to get rid of these clouds flying at different altitudes,” says Tran. “They [researchers] say that up to 90 percent of all contrails could be avoided by flying at different heights.”
Researchers at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Delta Air Lines are working together to find new ways to eliminate persistent contrails, the white clouds that trail behind airplanes, using an algorithm that predicts altitudes and locations where contrails are likely to form, reports Omose Ighodaro for Bloomberg. “The joint research group has already completed more than 40 testing flights and has plans for live experiment flights and simulations,” writes Ighodaro.
Politico reporter Alex Daugherty spotlights a study from MIT and the International Council on Clean Transportation which found “that the use of alternative jet fuels like e-kerosene in supersonic transport aircraft would still lead to an increased worsening of climate change because these faster gets burn more fuel per passenger.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that St. Elmo’s Fire could help protect airplanes from lightning strikes, reports Caroline Delbert for Popular Mechanics. The researchers found that “the special kind of electrical charge can be used to place a protective and preemptive charge around airplanes in flight, and wind affects flying versus grounded vehicles in opposite ways.”
New York Times reporter Elaine Glusac spotlights a study by Prof. Arnold Barnett that examines the safety of flying during the Covid-19 pandemic. Barnett found that “on a fully loaded flight, the chance of contracting Covid-19 was one in 4,300. If the middle seat is empty, the risk falls to one in 7,700.”