Back in June, we reported on a group of graduate and undergraduate students of the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland who made aeronautics history when their human-powered helicopter, dubbed Gamera, achieved lift-off and hovered above the ground for 4.2 seconds.

Just a few weeks ago, with their sights set firmly on winning the the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize, the team launched a second flight with the goal of staying in the air for 60 seconds. They fell short, only achieving a 12 second flight, but that doesn't make this video any less amazing.

As the pilot of this futuristic craft, biology student Judy Wexler broke the national record for longest human-powered flight while simultaneously setting the world record for the longest human-powered flight by a woman.

In order to win the Sikorsky Prize, a human-powered helicopter must fly at least thirty seconds, hover at least three meters above ground, and not drift outside a ten-meter square.

via Inhabitat

Image Credit: University of Maryland, Brandon Bush

Gamera is setting the new standard in human-powered flight.

From water-craft to monorail systems, human-powered machines seem to be on a rising trend. Recently, a team of 50 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Maryland have been testing a human-powered helicopter. The helicopter, called Gamera, was designed and built by students from the A. James Clark School of engineering.

On May 12, 2011, powered and piloted by biology student Judy Wexler, Gamera achieved lift-off and hovered for 4.2 seconds. Although a short flight, those 4.2. seconds established the U.S. national  records for duration of a human-powered helicopter flight and for duration of a human-powered helicopter flight piloted a woman, as certified by the National Aeronautic Association in Washington, D.C.

Keep an eye out for future flights from Gamera this summer. The team is setting their sights on a 60-second hover as well as a third flight in the fall to try for the still unclaimed Sikorsky prize.

Valued at $250,000, the Sikorsky Prize was established in 1980 by the American Helicopter Society in honor of helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky.

The Sikorsky Prize requires a team or individual to complete the following:

1) Build a helicopter powered only by human means

2) Lift off and achieve a hover time of 60 seconds

3) Achieve a height of 3 meters sometime during the 60 second flight

4) Stay within a 10 square meter area during the 60 second flight

We may still be a far reach from human-powered flight on a mass scale, but these Maryland students are definitely raising the bar.

Source:  University of Maryland

Green jet fuel made from the jatropha plant recently helped an Interjet Airbus A320-214 fly from Mexico City to Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas.

UOP LLC, an Illinois-based subsidiary of Honeywell International, supplied the technology needed to convert Mexican-sourced jatropha, an inedible plant that can be grown in many climates and does not compete with the food chain, into green jet fuel. During this process, hydrogen is added to remove oxygen from natural oils produced by feedstocks like jatropha and algae.

The biofuel was blended with traditional petroleum-derived jet fuel to supply power for one of the aircraft's engines. When used at up to a 50/50 ratio, the blended fuel can be used without changes to the aircraft technology and meets all of the critical specifications for flight.

Jatropha is just one of a group of plant sources for biofuel that are growing in popularity because they can be cultivated without competing with land used for food production. Algae, salicornia, switchgrass, and hemp are also being tested as alternatives for corn and petroleum-based fuels.

Image Credit: sustainabledesignupdate.com

It reads like a plot line from one of the National Lampoon movies...

"A team of uber nerds set out on cross-country road trip in an RV nicknamed after an urban assault vehicle, hell bent on convincing the government that they've discovered a way to make jet fuel from chicken fat."

No, it's not reality (TV), it's actuality.

Two scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center traveled 2,600 miles to meet up with other researchers at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California for an experiment with Hydrotreated Renewable Jet Fuel.

Researchers are testing the biofuel on a NASA DC-8 to measure its performance and emissions as part of the Alternative Aviation Fuel Experiment II, or AAFEX II.

"It's made out of chicken fat, actually," said Langley's Bruce Anderson, AAFEX II project scientist. "The Air Force bought many thousands of gallons of this to burn in some of their jets and provided about 8,000 gallons (30,283 liters) to NASA for this experiment."

These tests will assess exhaust emissions generated by modern turbine aircraft engines using a 50-50 mix of biofuel and regular jet fuel, biofuel only, and jet fuel only. With a goal of eventually flying all of its aircraft using 50 percent biofuel, the Air Force is very interested in finding a viable alternative to petroleum-based fuels.

Top Image: NASA's DC-8 at Dryden Flight Research Center's Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif.
Credit: NASA Dryden/Tom Tschida

Being a jet-setter is one of the fastest ways to rack up a hefty carbon-footprint, but these airports are helping travelers lighten the load.

Aviation is responsible for an estimated 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and many believe they could be even more damaging because they release these pollutants high in the atmosphere.

Despite the immense challenges involved in sustainably serving millions of passengers a year, these three international airports have already achieved the much-coveted "carbon neutral" status.

Stockholm-Arlanda Airport

Since 2005, Swedavia-owned Stockholm-Arlanda airport has been using only “green” electricity and since 2006 only district heating based on biofuel. Now, they've found a way to tap the world’s largest energy storage unit − the aquifer that exist underneath the massive building and terminals. This aquifer reduces the airport’s annual electricity consumption by 4 GWh and its district heating  consumption by around 15 GWh, for a total of 19 GWh − equivalent to the energy consumed by 2,000 single-family homes.

Christchurch International Airport Limited

In January 2008, CIAL became the first airport company in the Southern Hemisphere to attain certified carbon neutral status through the reduction and offsetting of the greenhouse gas emissions directly generated by the airport company’s operations. Currently the airport recycles all paper, waste oil, cardboard, plastic, metal and glass, and all green garden waste is composted.
CIAL Facilities Services staff also use EM Bokashi to reuse food scraps. CIAL uses electricity, LPG and diesel for energy supply, and has reduced electricity use for air conditioning by using groundwater as an energy source.

Gander International Airport

In August, Canada's Gander International Airport (CYQX) became North America's first carbon neutral airport. In an effort to establish a sustainable culture at the airport, authorities have established a program to reduce paper consumption, a procurement policy that gives preference to green vendors, and created strict anti-idling policies. The airport has also reduced electricity use, enabled more comprehensive recycling, and installed energy retrofits. Gander is just one among a small number of airports around the world that signed the 2008 Aviation and Environment Summit Declaration, which asks the industry to commit to carbon-neutral growth and a carbon-free future.

The buzz around carbon-neutral airports seems to be growing in still developing nations as well. Just two weeks ago, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) set a goal of making its five international airports carbon-neutral by 2020.

Image Credits (Flickr): emrank |

This article titled "The surprisingly complex truth about planes and climate change" was written by Duncan Clark, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 9th September 2010 10.23 UTC

We hear much about the environmental costs of air travel. As our recent Q&A explained, the problem is not just that planes burn a lot of fuel and therefore kick out plenty of CO2 per passenger. Just as important are a host of other high-altitude impacts, including vapour trails and ozone production, that are usually estimated to cause as much warming as the CO2 itself.

Hence we often hear that although air travel accounts for only a small fraction of global emissions (relatively few people can afford to fly), one transatlantic flight can add as much to your carbon footprint as a typical year's worth of driving.

Surely it couldn't get any worse, could it? Unfortunately for green-minded air travellers, it just did. Kind of.

The wrinkle, always vaguely understood by climate geeks but finally explored in depth in a recent scientific paper, is that the relative impact of different types of travel depends not just on practical factors such as engine efficiency and occupancy rates, but also on something altogether more abstract: the time frame you care about.

The reason this is so crucial is that the effects of different greenhouse gases play out in the atmosphere at a different speeds. CO2, released by all fuel-burning vehicles, can remain in the air for centuries, causing a gentle warming effect. By contrast, most other gases and impacts – such as the vapour trails and tropospheric ozone produced by planes at altitude – cause much more potent but shorter-lived bursts of warming.

If you'll forgive an extension to the "frying the planet" metaphor, generating global warming with CO2 is equivalent to slow-cooking the earth in a cast-iron skillet, whereas cooking the planet with vapour trails would be more like flash-frying it in an extra-hot wok.

In order to tot up these differently paced warming impacts into a single carbon footprint number for a flight or any other activity, it's necessary to decide what time frame you're talking about. Conventional wisdom is to add up the total warming impact of all the different greenhouse gases over the period of a century to create a nice, round but ultimately arbitrary number.

If, by contrast, we shifted the focus to a much shorter time period – which arguably would make more sense, given that the next decade or so could turn out to be make-or-break in terms of avoiding climate tipping points – then the impact of vapour trails and other short-lived impacts look massively more significant.

At risk of over-stretching the frying-pans analogy, the flash-fry wok may be more likely to cause a disastrous kitchen fire than the slow-cook skillet, even if they both use the same amount of heat overall.

The new paper, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, finally pins some numbers on all this theory by examining the impact over different time periods of various different modes of transport. The results are illuminating.

According to the paper, if we focus just on the impact over the next five years, then planes currently account for more global warming than all the cars on the world's roads – a stark reversal of the usual comparison. Per passenger mile, things are even more marked: flying turns out to be on average 50 times worse than driving in terms of a five-year warming impact.

If we shift to a 20-year time frame, things look completely different. The short-term impacts have largely died down and the plane looks considerably better – helped along by a quirk of atmospheric chemistry which sees nitrous oxide pollution from the aircraft engines causing cooling during this period by destroying methane in the air. The paper even suggests that for any time frame longer than 20 years, flying is typically greener per kilometre than driving (although when I phoned to check this, one of the authors of the report confirmed my suspicion that this isn't true in Europe, where fuel-efficient cars are more popular).

Of the various forms of transport examined by the researchers, shipping is the other one most markedly affected by short-term climate impacts. Here, however, everything is in reverse because the major short-term effect of shipping is sulfate aerosol pollution. While they remain in the air, these aerosol particles bounce sunlight away from the earth and therefore cause cooling rather than warming. The extent of this effect is amazing: if I'm understanding the numbers correctly, over a five-year time frame the world's ships cause enough cooling to offset the total warming caused by every car, plane and bus combined.

Even over a 20-year time frame, shipping pollution still contributes an overall cooling effect – as do electric trains, due to the aerosol pollution kicked out from coal-fired power stations. This throws up a tricky issue for policy makers and industry. If we clean up some kinds of air pollution for the benefit of environmental and human health, then we stand to significantly accelerate global warming in the near-term.

However the world deals with that particular conundrum, the new paper is a useful reminder that carbon footprints are more multi-dimensional than is usually understood. If we want to buy ourselves as much time as possible to avoid climate-tipping points, it may not just be how much warming something generates that matters, but when that warmth kicks in.

This issue isn't limited to transport, of course. Any activity that generates lots of methane, nitrous oxide or other non-CO2 greenhouse gases will have a much faster warming effect than its carbon footprint, as traditionally expressed, might suggest. That would include meat and rice farming, landfill sites and fridge production, for example.

All of which is – for carbon geeks such as myself, at least – very interesting. What I'd like to know next is how much work has been done on analysing how near-term rates of global warming fit with the risk of overstepping climate-tipping points. Any pointers?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Last week Boeing unveiled the Phantom Eye, a hydrogen powered unmanned spy plane.  The aircraft is designed to be constantly deployed in the stratosphere over a specific area, while providing intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and communication.

This state of the art UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) is equipped with a liquid-hydrogen propulsion system that powers two four-cylinder truck engines. Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works explains,

"It's basically a Ford Ranger truck engine converted to burn liquid and gaseous hydrogen."

The engines each provide 150 horsepower, combined with a 150 ft wingspan, allow the UAV to cruise at approximately 150 knots while carrying a 450 lb payload.  This highly efficient aircraft is also capable of staying aloft at 65,000 ft for up to four days and it's only byproduct is water.

The Phantom Eye is headed to Edwards Air Force Base in California later this summer to begin ground testing in preparation for its debut flight which is scheduled for 2011.  Officials expect the first flight to last between 4 and 8 hours.

Boeing is also working on a larger UAV that will stay be capable of staying in the air for 10 days.

Images via  Boeing Phantom Works Communications