Renewables are nice. But how can a 500+ pax plane be powered with renewables? You need to cut down a rainforest to supply all airlines for one year to have fuel on a biological basis. Or do you think of solar power? Or maybe hydrogen or nuclear? :wink:
ditto to the nuclear comment from before.
Hydrogen takes (ba-da-da-baaaa) nuclear plants on the ground, which takes a huge amount to overcome the NIMBY [Not in my backyard] factor in most places. Most other powersources are unlikely to supply sufficiently cheap unsubsidized power [solar, wind for example] or are [ba-da-da-baaa] coal plants resulting in little to no reduction in CO2 emissions. Hydrogen simply takes too much power to split water to make hydrogen for fuel for it to be practical anywhere outside of politics at the moment. Just to fuel America's cars with hydrogen, i believe the number of new Nuclear plants needed is somewhere between 8 and 12. I'd be a little scared to think of what it would take to add the airlines into that.
Solar planes at the moment need to be exceptionally light, huge wings, with several electric powered props on them. There's a few radio controlled ones that can fly indefinitely... but nowhere near anything practical enough to fly any pilots, let alone passengers, between cities. and our current Battery technologies are vastly insufficient to pull off any kind of effective plug-in, hybrid model. This also means we can't have plug-in planes [which goes back to needing nuclear plants to supply power to the power grid].
The a380 is a grossly impractical plane at the moment. That's why it's likely to be a commercial failure for the next decade [from a ROI standpoint, and from an A vs B standpoint]. Its huge, gas guzzling [even if it's more efficient per seatmile... it takes filling it to achieve that number, and likely several hundred economy seats and few first class/business], and takes 3 loading bridges.
We're in a sorry state at the moment.
