Virgin Biofuel flight makes the headlines.

[Nottingham Nick]

Link to BBC News.

Friends of the Earth are accusing VS of being involved in a 'gimmick'. [:0]

Surely they wouldn't do something like this, purely as a publicity stunt? [:w][:D][}:)]


Nick

[Darren Wheeler]

At least Heathrow will smell a little better. if every airline userd it, the place would smell like a giant chippy [y]

At last, i was wondering when this was going to happen. I know they said Febuary but was expecting it earlier for some reason.
Does anyone know which a/c is being used? I hope that its not from LHR as that would be a v:port a/c down. Maybe this is why G-VSUN fley to America a few days ago to cover this a/c.

[RichardMannion]

Friends of the Earth will never be happy unless we move back to the Feudal/Stone Age.

Originally posted by RichardMannion
Friends of the Earth will never be happy unless we move back to the Feudal/Stone Age.

Well said...My sentiments exactly.
Good on VS if: This Works Proves cost effective Does actually produce less nasty emissions (I'm not very au fait with environmental terms This isn't just a gimmick

I'm really not convinced by biofuel. Unless it's from algae, it's going to come from crops that:


Come from plants, resulting in rotten plant material which produces methane amongst other nastys reduces the amount of food available to us mere mortals!

[Darren Wheeler]

Apparently the biofuel VS are using does not compete food supplies. All will be revealed later. Sky News are carrying it at 11:05

Originally posted by Darren Wheeler
Apparently the biofuel VS are using does not compete food supplies. All will be revealed later. Sky News are carrying it at 11:05

Maybe, but if everyone starts on the biofuel bandwagon we'll end up with every man and his dog chopping down forests to grow the stuff. It can't all come from sheep poo and algae.

Whilst my statement above may be a little alarmist, take a look at what malaysia is doing to borneo to produce palm oil...

[Darren Wheeler]

Picking bits out of the subtitles for the interview with SRB, the plane will be using a 40/60 mix of biofuel and normal aviation fuel as this will prevent freezing at altitude.

[Decker]

Nice details here

The Virgin Atlantic 747-400 -- registration GV-WOW, operating as Flt. VS811P -- will fly using a biofuel blend composed of babassu oil and coconut oil provided by Seattle-based Imperium Renewables. These oils are economically and socially sustainable and can be found in everyday cosmetic products including lip balm and shaving cream. In addition, the babassu nuts and coconuts were harvested from existing, mature plantations. No modifications were made to either the aircraft or its engines to enable the flight to take place.

[Darren Wheeler]

I thought they had modified the plane so that the fuel was only fed to one desginated engine in case of problems.

Originally posted by virgin crazy
At last, i was wondering when this was going to happen. I know they said Febuary but was expecting it earlier for some reason.
Does anyone know which a/c is being used? I hope that its not from LHR as that would be a v:port a/c down. Maybe this is why G-VSUN fley to America a few days ago to cover this a/c.

Decker post confirms G-VWOW is the selected a/c for the trial.

This won't be a special one off trip to AMS just for the biofuel trial, she would have been going to AMS anyway for scheduled maintenance or a paintjob - This would have been planned into VS's ops previously so won't leave LHR short of a B744 just because of this trial. [:D]

Well all I was actually at this press conference this morning in a very cold hanger at heathrow. G-VWOW was the plane cover girl freshly cleaned, although it does need a new paint job. The flight was a combination of fuels, with one engine isolated to run on the coconut biofuel so approx 20% of the aircraft fuel was biofuel. It prompted one journalist to ask how many coconuts does it take to fill a plane, and how many rainforests are needed for the nuts, and the rough calculations for this was roughly the land mass of the USA for all the commercial a/c in the world. Anyhow the actual fuel to be used in later trials this year will not be based on the fuel used today. It will be algae produced from waste, which is scalable and easier to produce.

All in all interesting for guest and media to mingle, SRB and CEO were quite interesting, oh and news on various other aspects of the business, will post seperately to that one

Ill upload the photos shortly

I noticed that she looked very clean and shiny when she was in the hanger.

If Friends of the Earth wish to be credible as an organisation they should stick to facts, leaving others to draw conclusions about VA's (or any other company's) possible cynical motives.

Ironically it is absolutely feasible for a small organisation like VA to achieve Carbon neutrality in the near future, to the twin benefit of the environment and VA's publicity machine. It can be done by identifying and expoiting the waste output of an existing commercial or agricultural process of the right scale. Does it then really matter what SRB's true motives are?

It is much more difficult for the airline industry as a whole to upscale any bio-fuel production process without leading to critism of displacing food crops and consequent deforestation. If VA can get it right and get there first, it could leave its competitors high and dry.

Originally posted by Darren Wheeler
I thought they had modified the plane so that the fuel was only fed to one desginated engine in case of problems.

It won't have been a 'modification' per-se, just the fuel configuration used for the ferry flight.

The 747-400 has eight fuel tanks, three in each wing, a centre tank in the belly, and a tank in the vertical part of the tail. Various fuel configurations are used depending on the fuel load. The wings always have fuel, if more fuel is required, the centre tank is loaded, and finally if the flight is really long, the tail tank too. It's then consumed in reverse order (tail tank is emptied first - actually fuel is taken by the engines from the centre tank, as fuel is used, the tail tank drains into the centre tank).

With less than 130000 lbs, or about 59 Tonnes, of fuel on board, all the fuel remaining is in the wing tanks, and the 747-400 feeds fuel to the engines in a configuration known as 'TANK/ENG'. In this configuration, the centre and tail tanks are empty, and each engine is fed directly from a separate fuel tank in the wing (no cross-feeding).

The fuel required for the ferry flight would be significantly less than 59 Tonnes. (The total fuel loaded would likely be less than 20 Tonnes.)

Therefore the aircraft would by default operate in TANK/ENG config, which would ensure that the biofuel tank would only feed one engine.

So I'm guessing one of the wing tanks will either have been drained of regular Jet-A and refilled with the biofuel mix, or the biofuel additive will have been blended in the correct proportions with the existing Jet-A in the tank for the flight.

Given that WOW is going for maintenance at KLM Engineering, the tanks will be drained for inspection during the maintenance process in any case, and it's likely that the biofuelled engine was already due for exchange with a freshly overhauled engine too.

It was probably a good use of a circumstance to generate some publicity for the airline and provide fuel researchers with some valuable statistics. I'm certain that the engine data will have been recorded and closely monitored during the flight, looking for things such as differences in fuel flow for a particular power setting, differences in exhaust gas temperatures, etc.

Oh, and as far as being an 'aircraft down', some of you will have noticed that LAX 7/8 were planned to switch to A346 on Friday, so this has been planned for some time (and one of the Airbuses on maintenance in Manila came back on Wednesday, I think).

Mike

It is interesting and if it leads to something that is the way forward then is a great idea. It has certainly got the media coverage, which is no bad thing for VS or the idea in general.

One thing that is interesting is that Greenpeace are saying that we should look at the expansion of airports etc. and that we shouldn't be doing this. Friends of the Earth has never said don't fly, their approach is that people need to fly, but we should curb the impact this has. One thing, that has been raised is that its well and good to reduce emissions by using bio-fuel, however the work thats required to produce the product to do this can maybe cause more emissions in the process.

I hope that future trials lead to a solutions and it'll be interesting how the press deal with this tomorrow.

G.

The 747-400 has eight fuel tanks, three in each wing, a centre tank in the belly, and a tank in the vertical part of the tail. Various fuel configurations are used depending on the fuel load. The wings always have fuel, if more fuel is required, the centre tank is loaded, and finally if the flight is really long, the tail tank too. It's then consumed in reverse order (tail tank is emptied first - actually fuel is taken by the engines from the centre tank, as fuel is used, the tail tank drains into the centre tank).

Not 100% correct (but nearly)! The tail tank is actually part of the horizontal stabiliser & VS don't use this tank for any of their routes (HKG used to). The outer wing tanks always contains fuel & it is used last (alleviates the air load on the wing).

Be interesting to see the results of the trial, i believe Qatar Airways are also doing trials in the future.

Air New Zeland and Rolls Royce start trials later in the year also

Originally posted by woggledog

Originally posted by Darren Wheeler
Apparently the biofuel VS are using does not compete food supplies. All will be revealed later. Sky News are carrying it at 11:05

Maybe, but if everyone starts on the biofuel bandwagon we'll end up with every man and his dog chopping down forests to grow the stuff. It can't all come from sheep poo and algae.

Whilst my statement above may be a little alarmist, take a look at what malaysia is doing to borneo to produce palm oil...

I hate being right.... Do your sodding homework Beardy. Palm oil is not the answer...

[Decker]

GreenPeace item - to selectively quote

mixture of coconut and babassu oil. These aren't food crops as such

[Decker]

and there's more...

[mitchja]

Originally posted by Decker
and there's more...

What has a Virgin Blue B737 got to do with this though [:?] Dont you just way off photos in such articles [:w]

Regards