The future of air travel
There are many different forces working on the airline industry in the current climate. The market pressures from the fact that households are being squeezed, and are therefore feel unable to splash out on holidays. And then there are the pressures from environmentalist groups and lobby groups for airline companies to use less polluting technologies; and governments put a strain on the industry by hiking up fuel tax for the purpose of discouragement.
If air travel is to have a future, then, it must be one in which air travel is affordable, and environmentally friendly. But is that really a possibility? Is it not a more sensible option to just rely on a technology we already know to be cheap and relatively low impact, like cycling or trains? And this brings us to the final pressure on the airline industry: the demands of modern life. Business and industry has become so integrated with air travel, because of its speed and convenience, so that abandoning it is not really an option.
The only option available to us, then, is to develop a technology for flying that is superior in all these respects. Thankfully, there are companies that have picked up the gauntlet on this challenge, and their ideas on the matter are starting to take form. EADS, the company, for example, has recently uncovered their plans for a new hypersonic, stratospheric rocket place.
The project is called Zehst, which stands for zero emission hypersonic transportation, and will carry 100 passengers from London to Tokyo in just two and a half hours, at a height of around 20 miles high. The best part is that because it will run on the combination of bio fuels made from algae and seaweed, and hydrogen and oxygen to get into the stratosphere, the plane will be totally environmentally clean.
So it seems the dream of a clean, fast and convenient plane is one that could be realised; but it remains to be seen as to whether it will be affordable. Boeing are also developing a form of supersonic airliner, and have actually performed tests on a pilotless model. EADS claims, however, that there is nothing to suggest that Boeings model will be environmentally clean like their own.
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