So there are several things that didn't end up in this video that are worth mentioning. Things like hydrogen fuel cell planes and carbon neutral jet fuel from algae or direct air capture. There are also specific plane designs that are noteworthy like the Blackfly (www.opener.aero/) and Lilium (lilium.com/). Also, NASA just released some cool features on their electric X-57 Maxwell: ua-cam.com/video/1N7vYXwBJQ8/v-deo.html Then there's the laminar flow designs of planes like the Otto Aviation Celera 500l ua-cam.com/video/CN4EKZHYVaE/v-deo.html Basically, this video only scratches the surface. Anything else you think is relevant please share in the comments. :)
There is no such thing as Carbon neutral jet fuel. Your fooling yourself with bookkeeping. It containes carbon. Hydrogen does not. Jet engine can be designed to run on Hydrogen. Liquid Hydrogen has Twice the energy density of any carbon containing fuel, half the weight at takeoff. Aircraft design point will change with Liquid Hydrogen powered planes to accommodate the increase in internal volume required, but it's not a big deal. Liquid Hydrogen Powered aircraft will look different than today's commercial aircraft because fuel tanks will be larger.
@Wuanslm: No because you need 4 times the amount of hydrogen than Kerosene to produce the same amount of energy. Plus it can only be stored in the fuselage unless you want boom.
Hey Joe, Big fan of the channel, but this my first time commenting because it's a subject I have at least a little bit of expertise in, unlike pretty much any other video you've done. I'm currently sitting at home as a stay at home dad because I've been furloughed from American Airlines, where up until October 1st I was a first officer operating the Boeing 737. Overall I really enjoyed the video, and as you yourself mentioned, it's a huge topic that there's much more to say about. Perusing the comments there seems to be plenty of good ideas out there for reducing our carbon footprint and I'm glad to see it, I think it would be amazing (and the right thing to do for our children) if by the time I retire the airline industry was at least primarily operating on renewables. There's just a couple things I want to mention that I don't think anyone else has. 1. You mentioned smaller electric aircraft as a solution to shorter routes. There are several issues with this, many of which are probably evident, but one of the things that stands out to me is the lack of infrastructure. If you replace regional jets that haul ~90 people with small electric jets that haul 9, then you have 10 times as many planes to deal with to move the same amount of people. This means 10 times as many pilots (or still 5 if you want to operate single pilot, but that's a whole other subject), far more ramp personnel, gate agents, space taken up at airports, etc. The ability of the airport and ATC to handle that amount of aircraft is wildly inadequate, and even if you move a lot of the smaller aircraft out to smaller satellite airports, the ATC system and the airspace it's self would quickly become completely overwhelmed. Over time we could potentially adjust towards this, but it's such a massive undertaking I'm quite sure that solutions towards alternative fuels for larger aircraft will occur first. 2. You mentioned aircraft taking off heavy and dumping fuel in the event of an emergency. This isn't really the case anymore. There are some relics flying around that can and will dump fuel, but the vast majority of aircraft operated by US airlines these days have no fuel dump capability. It isn't worth the danger or liability, and even if you dump into the ocean, the environmental impact. The modern solution to being overweight is simply to run an overweight landing checklist to prepare, and minimize the impact on the landing gear. After landing the aircraft is taken out of service and the gear is inspected for any damage before being used again.
I think the answer to 1. was we fly a lot less to start with and its actually a far easier proposition to automate flying than self driving cars. However, even then the economics don't stack up. Airline economics mean the aircraft in the air as much as possible - but recharging will always be an issue even if the batteries were ideal you'd need to draw Megawatts from the grid and that won't work. Then I think the issue of weight is almost insurmountable, weight is the enemy of any locomotion but for aircraft its a much bigger issue because you need more lift which then scales the drag. Drag is basically where all your fuel goes. So- not going to work no matter what you do.
@@dr_jaymz Perhaps it's feasible to set up a bullet train network across America and Canada (reaching up to Alaska, of course) and then have conventional jets for long-range (like NY-Anchorage or to cross the oceans) or urgent trips (those would be the ones that deliver supplies to remote areas or send personnel in case of emergencies).
Manhattan Island would be a good example, many rules on where helicopters can land, travel along the water etc. Now they think 10,000 personal flying devices can be used in the same airspace. The first 10 accidents would end that dream.
@@Mexalen81 Electric boats (at least major ones) are like minor power plants that usually can create electricity in multiple ways. So, no, they'd not sink, check the examples of them, they are very solid.
Also, hydrogen powered fuel cell as back up power. Making fuel right on the boat that use electrolysis to separate hydrogen for power and use the by product water to for showers and sinks.
Exactly but you have to make sure the stations are in the heart of the city's financial and tourist district where people actually want to go to, and that adds a lot to the up front cost. The temptation to go cheap and have the station on the outskirts is very high, however self-defeating. Also you have to resist the temptation to have many stops at minor points on the way, no matter how much local politicians push for it, and ideally you have to give the high speed train its own dedicated rail line so it's not slowed down by slower other traffic.
@@IrishCarney I nice example is the 431 km trip between Amsterdam and Paris, it takes you from the center of Amsterdam to the centre of Paris in 3 hours and 20 minutes for 20 euros (if you reserve early). A flight is still shorter, including going through customs, checking in etc but by a small margin and generally more expensive.
@@IrishCarney most train stations already are in the centre of the cities/most cities more than 60-70 years old HAVE train stations right in the central business/tourism/socializing hub. The hard part of the infrastructure (obtaining all that expensive downtown real estate) is, for the most part, already done.
James Purcer - Elon will do that for you if you accept the sound effects in your headphones only w/ an auto-cutoff whenever ATC or co-pilot is on the comm... Besides to keep in-cabin noise down w/o extra weight, noise-cancelling electronics should be used to the max - global in cabin & individual headphones (w/ mics for conversations); pilot’s headphone and has ~4 voice activated channels - talk to devices, ATC/copilot, copilot/flt-attendant, or all in aircraft (add a channel if you’re the Purcer...) 😏
@Melvi Vanilly hes saying that physics has ruined since 0.000...043 seconds after the big bang because modern physics seems to tap out in meaning to any time before that.
@MrDeathtower "10e−43" actually means "10⁻⁴³" when someone doesn't know how or doesn't want to bother to use the proper characters. It is not 0.0…43 but 0.0…01. 43 is the number of zeros.
@@neogeo1670 China is not poor. In my lifetime I went from hearing about how you couldn't throw away food because there were poor kids starving in China to as an adult seeing most of the US government budget being financed by borrowed money from China. Pretty amazing.
Majority of people doesn't like what you did.. Well that's sounds socialist Using that word to shame people because they want to travel because maybe they want to see their love ones is just plain stupid Just innovate and the idea of short flight with electric planes are great but long duration flight.. I don't know how they're going to solve that
@@grayscale888 solid state batteries. First car slated to use solid state is 2024 roughly. Much higher energy density and charges in seconds. Also much lighter.
@@davidbeaulieu4815 solid state batteries are still about 10 times less energy dense than jet fuel. The only solution I see feasible is hydrogen fuel cells but storage will be an issue.
The small scale modular fission reactors could get small enough to solve the main power problem, but in a unmanned taxi ? What drunken annoyed with the world idiot is going to try and fiddle with the power source, same reason I don't like slushy Hydrogen tanks on anything near my fellow man to be honest I have trouble with trusting many people with petrol.
I think a Chinese lab was able to develop an electric jet engine. It's tiny and inefficient, but it's also the first. The team is deliberating how they can improve the design and potentially make it viable.
@@jsn1252 EDF is a dead end. The airspeed is so much slower than Chinese electric bullet trains that are already running all over the place. There's no reason for EDF powered airliners to exist, even assuming battery weight problem is solved. Electric plasma jet airliners at least have a reason to exist, if not worth the effort.
@To Release is To Resolve Yeah they should be like the people during the early civil rights movement, making sacrifices (Montgomery bus boycotts, Sit in beatings, Loss of amenities) you can't just hector everyone into changing behavior without doing it your self, Greta's sail across the Atlantic is a good example but yeah, td;lr sitting here on the internet being angry won't help anyone so just serve a good example for your community
On the topic of drones. I would love to see something on the automation of farming. Crop dusters, automated planters and harvester, logistics. It would be neat to see more about what’s in the pipeline in this area. Love the channel, keep up the amazing work!
Need a 2nd video on this, as you state Joe to cover the points you didn't cover like Hydrogen (burning or fuel cell - and what the difference is), and exactly at what point the energy density per KG and volume would be required before 'larger' plans could be used. You can forward predict that based on the trajectory of battery improvements over the last 10 years or so (if looking at Li-ion). Its always good when content leads to more content, keeps the viewers engaged 🙂
45-90 times. Batteries would need to hold 45-90 (lets call it 70) times more power per kg to equal the energy density of current jet fuel. However, that does not take into count the efficiency current jet powered aircraft gain as a flight goes on and they burn fuel (and reduce their weight). Once you overcome that issue, you will then need to reinforce the landing gear for the added landing weight (since the battery weight doesn't change in flight). That will add even more weight that will now require more battery power to compensate for. That takes you to the one problem that almost everyone that wants electric airplanes forgets... propellers have a speed problem. Once the tips start to break the speed of sound, the shockwave they produce prevents them from pushing air. That is why you don't see many prop aircraft (not counting WWII fighters) going much more then 350 knots. The problem with Hydrogen falls into two categories. Using it as a straight replacement for jet fuel is a no-go. Jet fuel is a lot more energy dense than Hydrogen. Same reason you would not use it to run an ICE car. The fuel cell would work better than batteries (i.e. less weight) but would still run into the same problem with the props. Also, Hydrogen has one other tiny problem... storage space. By the time you loaded enough Hydrogen into a 737 size aircraft to fly from LAX to Denver, you would not have any space left for PAX or cargo.
@@jarheadcharlie2315 Some good points but despite 45-90 times being quite a wide margin, I don't think it's correct as I believe that figure refers to the absolute energy density of fuel compared to a battery but it doesn't account for the efficiency of the engine and its ability to convert the fuel to work. ICE isn't brilliant at typically around 30% but I believe jet engines have significantly improved over time with some as high as 50% (when looking at overall efficiency), but that doesn't compare favourably to electric motors of over 90% and hence that figure changes to just 4 or 5 times in a car. Ok, to your other points (and the reason a 2nd video needs to go into more detail showing the proposed future tech engines and how they work), yes if you run what would be a highly efficient electric 'turbo prop' style engine you will be limited in speed in the same way turbo props are now, but the future hybrid hydrogen turbo fan electric engines seek to overcome those issues. The compressor part of the engine runs from battery electric (recharged from a fuel cell since you're carrying some hydrogen anyway) and then a small amount of hydrogen is injected and 'burned' to get the jet effect. Hydrogen has around 3 times the energy density of jet fuel but less than 3 times the volumetric density so you're probably are redesigning your fuselage and wings to equate performance, and that's no small task, but it doesn't prevent hybrid Hydrogen engines replacing jet fuel burning engines in the future. The whole technology, problems and considerations around it is quite interesting. Maybe Joe could have done 2 videos, one explaining the problems and another with potential solutions a bit like the Going to Mars is a good idea/bad idea videos. A colab with Tim Dodd might have been a good idea too due to his work describing the differences +/- when using hydrolox engines compared to kerolox etc.
It's simple: Storing and releasing energy in chemical form, regardless if burning stuff or discharging a battery, is basically a RedOx reaction. Batteries are doomed by having to carry both fuel and oxidizer with them for the whole journey. Fossil fuels have to carry only the fuel, and can dump even that overboard once it's spent. In a mode of transport whose efficiency is directly tied to weight, that makes electric propulsion a non-starter, except for some specialized niches. Clearly creating chemical fuels that can burn atmospheric oxygen and are produced in a carbon-neutral way are way more promising.
Batteries are improving energy density at a rate of about 4% a year since lithium ion entered the market which is pretty fast. It might not replace jet engines but will quickly replace piston engines.
@@JD-yx7be Still doesn't solve the pricipal dilemma explained above. With piston engines you can reap the benefit of the electric motor being much better adapted, though that works even better for wheel bound vehicles. But you still have to take the oxydizer along for the ride.
That sounds like hydrogen to me. Although the way fuel is stored inside a wing is going to be insufficient for hydrogen storage. Another idea would be to make a bio version of jet fuel, if possible. Edit: Seems like there already exists bio jet fuel:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel So it's just a matter of financing and the willingness of companies to support it.
@@captainahab5522 That works, but to produce enough solar fuel for the kind of energy wasting we do on Terra will require ridiculous amounts of real estate. What can work for a martian colony may not scale for earths population at large.
@@snek9353 no, it would have to be Trump. His mental state has been declining recently and he is embracing his inner Karen by filing lawsuits. He’s also a loser sooo...
8:55 I feel this incorrect. A prop engine will never be more powerful than a jet engine. The issue with that is, you can only turn a propeller so fast before the tip of the propeller reaches the transonic phase, after which you begin to create drag the faster you turn that prop. Adding an electric motor won’t change that since at the end of the day; whether you’re flying a piston engined plane from the 40s, or you’re flying a brand new electric plane, the fact of the matter is that a jet engine’s ability to compress air and then combust it will forever be it’s advantage when relating to “power”.
Leonardo Da Vinky in a nutshell: I'm four parallel universes ahead of you but I'm held back by the technology of my time. Edit 1: Had to change Da Vinci to Da Vinky for obvious reasons
One thing that has bugged me. The reactions of people who don’t understand forward thinking, and by that being a thing, the real question is.... has that hesitation to believe in people like da Vinci when they are alive benefited us, saved us or left us in the dust?
every time joe says "we" just substitute the 1% who is actually flying frequently and creating all the pollution. "we" normal people only fly on average maybe once a year at most.
the average is still only about 2 per year per person. Of course roughly 50% of the population doesn't fly at all, so you have a small minority that flies a ton and makes up the difference.
To blame the rich when the 3/4 of the plane seats are the "cheap" ones is over reaching. A lot of people travel coz its part of their job. Or at least it was before the pandemic.
@@alexforce9 Interesting point. However, I'd like to mention that the "rich" are the reason that flying is so cheap. The airline doesn't make any money from coach; all the profits come from first and business class; the economy passengers are just there to offset the cost of fuel. If the rich weren't flying then many more people would be completely unable to afford flying at all. Which I guess would be a "good" thing from the perspective of the video, but it would suck from the perspective of a normal person wanting affordable travel. Since most environmentalists are elitist snobs (or just clueless), I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are OK with air travel being "reserved" for the wealthy.
@@alexforce9 It's also significantly safer to fly than drive. Those "short distance" flights, we do a lot, 700 some miles instead of driving, takes under half a day vs a long ass day and... ...must less chance of dying than if we drive that far
Great video, as always. Just a small thing that bugged me in your explanation. Common airliners are actually designed to take off at a weight that's higher than the maximum allowed landing weight. This allows the landing gear to be designed to withstand lower loads and hence reduces the dry weight of the aircraft. Emergency landings right after taking off when you're full of fuel are relatively rare, so dumping excess fuel every now and then ends up being cheaper and more fuel efficient in the long term. If it's any consolation, there's huge cleanup fines that airlines need to pay if they have to dump fuel and this goes towards cleaning up the mess that dumping creates. There also dedicated dumping zones near every major airport so that the fuel will not affect a vulnerable habitat or be dumped on buildings. In the case of electric planes, since batteries do not lose weight over the course of the flight as you correctly stated, the landing gear will be designed using the full weight of the aircraft in mind. The electric aircraft will therefore not be less safe if it needs to land shortly after taking off, since this mass will be the mass the aircraft was designed for. Just wanted to clear things up a bit :). Great video as always
Full self driving cars will replace a lot of short haul air flights, as you can get in your car, turn on fsd, and onward you go.(Edit, corrected spelling)
@@BadOompaloompa79 Why though when we could just produce liquid fuels that are carbon neutral? The human race never goes backwards by choice and never will.
@@filonin2 I would consider people having the time and awareness of the consequences enough to travel slower a step forward for humanity not a step back.
Hydrogen offers much higher energy density than batteries, though I don't know the figures offhand. I expect that jet propulsion may also be possible. There are safely issues of course, but perhaps no worse than with jet fuel.
We had bad history with hydrogen (I mean giant balloons turning into massive balls of fire are great example of that), but the main issue I think would be the cost of fuel production and transport of it. Which probably will not be as bad choice when fossil fuels will be finished (unless we start the third war for the Antarctica's oil - which probably will happen, but we can only pray that it won't), unless we will finally reach a new breakthrough in the batteries department.
@@Number_Free Depends on your definition of density: energy per mass, sure but not energy per volume. Problem is that hydrogen is a gas. Gases take a lot of space. Or you have to do with a lot of isolation and cooling to liquify it, which adds to weight again. Also hydrogen has that safety problem, see the Hindenburg disaster.
With the weight argument you also need to consider efficiencies. A jet engine might be 30% efficient which means 70% of the fuel and its weight is not used for forward propulsion but instead gets wasted as heat. 70% of the energy carried in the fuel is therefore dead weight. An electric motor might be 95% efficient. Most of the energy stored in the cells is used for forward propulsion.
@Chris Van Bekkum see i used to be like you then I remembered third world countries and emergency response vehicles and military vehicles. Good luck finding a place to charge your electronic truck in a enemy nation. Hydrogen can be moved its liquid electricity. It doesn't matter that its expensive to produce the benefits outweigh the costs which will drop as more suppliers come online.
Hydrogen blimps for Amazon and delivery drones would be the only solution I see working. It saves on electricity usage as long as it isn't windy, and can greatly increase the weight able to be carried.
@Chris Van Bekkum You sure? - www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zeroe.html And before you argue the production of - www.japan.go.jp/tomodachi/2020/earlysummer2020/hydrogen.html
I'm an airline pilot that burns tonnes of gas per hour. The strangest company memo I've seen was "we need to save the trees, please recycle paper", so yeah.
The best thing you can do is follow the most fuel efficient flight profile. Get to the next gate 15 minutes slower, don't hurry, long gliding descents instead of maintaining given altitudes. A bit slower ascent to max cruising altitude........
I am a glider pilot. Have you tried switching off the engines, popping out the Ram Air Turbine and thermalling? I guess you won't have enough power for the onboard entertainment system but you gotta sacrifice something.
@@paulmakinson1965 No, they usually point the nose down into a high speed dive to get to the runway as soon as possible. That's why it's so noisy in the back with all the air rushing by when descending.
@@bigglyguy8429 And the anxiety, when it starts beeping because it dropped to 10%... Doubled down if wind changed and not only you are not anymore returning on it, but rather against it, but it's also stronger... Particularly scary it is, when you are standing on the observation platform on a solitary high rock above and in middle of the forest...
@@theq4602 The concept of drones dates back to 1849, when Austria attacked Venice using unmanned balloons stuffed with explosives. Austrian forces, who were besieging Venice at the time, launched around 200 of these incendiary balloons over the city. The British were using pilotless aircraft in 1916, and radio controlled fixed wing aircraft in the 1930s.
As an airline pilot I really enjoyed the video and was impressed by the depth of knowledge. One thing that I would add for thought; The engines also serve an additional purpose beyond the production of thrust. In bad weather we use hot air ducted from the engines to prevent ice from forming on the wings and other critical areas. So an alternative to ice prevention would need to be worked out. There are other forms of deice/anti-ice, liquid (weeping wings), phenumatic boots, but these are not practical for use on jets. Electricity is used to heat probes and windows but to power the electric heat elements draws a lot of electric power. There is definitely a lot to overcome.
Although, I'm about 5 miles from one of their DC's so sure, send a drone for my 3 pound item and drop it in my backyard instead of driving the van over.
Thanks for another great video, Joe! Answering your question: nobody wants to pay for the expensive infrastructure for high-speed railways, but, inside big countries like Russia, Canada, China, the USA, Brazil, Australia, and India, that's probably the one single best option for fast transportation. China had an early start on that, but the others seem to be taking their time. Since most people can't go back to the old ship cruising days, I guess that's another topic that environmentalists will have to push hard for.
the u.s. already has a plane network that can get people to anywhere with an airport in a few hours with any railway infrastructure mostly being used for freight if it's not abandoned track, and that's assuming the unused abandoned track wasn't ripped up yet.
People are willing to pay for infrastructure if it allows them to use a cheap, simple and fast transportation system. Travelling by plane is expensive and travelling by car is slow.
Hybrid planes maybe a solution , planes have a large energy requirement to get to cruising altitude. If you electrified the plane engines. Use a jet engine to run a generator sized for cruise speed requirements and use capacitors or batteries to give the energy for the ground to cruise height requirements. Efficiencies with electric engine placements , composite materials, flying wing designs should allow long haul designs. Short haul can be met with battery tech improvements over the next 5 to 10 years. Military drove tech will give us pilotless planes further cutting weight. This would allow smaller planes that would be easier to electrify. Also the fuel efficiency of aviation fuel like most fuel burning is around 30%.
There is another viable position: keep aviation the way it is, and just electrify everything else. As you said, aviation is only 2% of global CO2 emissions. If that were all humanity's emissions, it's sustainable in the long run. Not to mention the other alternative: liquid hydrogen instead of jet fuel. Jet engines can burn hydrogen very efficiently with little modification. The energy density of liquid hydrogen is pretty good, even considering the weight of the tanks. But aircraft need to be redesigned to have the tanks in the fuselage. There were flying prototypes of this in the 1950s.
Methane is more practical than hydrogen, due to having twice the volumetric energy density, and being the most practical of the hydrocarbons to produce from carbon dioxide.
@@absalomdraconis Burning Methane also has the advantage of transforming a massively worse greenhouse gas into a less bad one. And it can also be produced easily from human food and bio waste products. Assuming we can put in place the infrastructure to capture it instead of letting it leak into the atmosphere.
Keep in mind that water, released in the upper atmosphere, is a significant greenhouse gas. Don't assume that "It's just water, its fine". For water in the lower atmosphere, this might be true, but water in the higher atmosphere tends to stay there for long times, and given the amount of normal, precovid airtravel, going for Hydrogen significantly increases the amount of water vapor. Also Hydrogen cannot fullfill some of the task jet fuel fullfills in the engine, such as cooling and hydraulic actuation. There is more then just "releasing heat" that a fuel has to do to be suitable.
@@GermanTopGameTV Liquid hydrogen is one of the best coolants in existence - a jet engine could be easily modified to cool via fuel lines - just like what is done with liquid hydrogen rocket engines. I'm not sure if they needed this in the Tu-155 prototype, but it certainly flew: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155 Agreed - water in the stratosphere is a significant problem even with current airplanes - it traps solar heat better than CO2 does. However, back to my first point: if we tackle the easier global CO2 reductions first, air travel would become environmentally sustainable - even with additional water vapor.
@@absalomdraconis Yes, but Methane produces CO2. Slightly less than jet fuel does, but CO2 nonetheless. At least it solves the problem of where to source the fuel without the oil industry though.
HELL, I was cooking, so did I miss the part about Hyperloop or did he really not mention it? Transcontinental... Ok, no solution there, but most flights are over land.... Right?
I am a big fan of railway journeys. I will happily take a 16 hour train journey than a 6 hour economy class flight. A train leaving early in the evening and reaching destination early in the morning would be the optimal use of my time and I will reach my destination well slept. Off course, I am assuming several things like sufficiently comfortable sleeping arrangement and specific timings etc.
Sounds great, but the economics don't work. For every Berlin to New York trip an airship could make one way a jet airliner could make 3 or 4 round trips carrying twice as many passengers. Air fare on the Hindenberg one way was ~$10,000 in today's dollars. It would be really nice to arrive at your destination relaxed and no jet lag though.
@@aceroadholder2185 Hindenburg was run by socialists as a show pony and made way too much effort at high-class BS gee I wonder why it was not cost efficient....?
@@Barskor1 I don't think you know very much about the Zeppelin company. It was not run by socialists nor was the company a fan of the Nazi regime. The company today still isn't run by socialists.
@@aceroadholder2185 Hey Count Von Zeppelin are you part of the government? Why yes sir. Also when Hitler took over all businesses were nationalized with a universal union and so on....
I imagine Amazon using autonomous electric “aircraft carriers”. They would deliver packages to homes using drones. The drones return to the carrier to charge up a bit between deliveries. The carriers would drive to strategic locations and disperse the drones with their packages.
They've been doing it for years. www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-03/china-s-on-the-fast-track-to-making-uav-drone-deliveries They've also been a cashless society for years. America is pretty much an antiquated backwater these days.
Well, whoever invented the English spelling was raving mad. The Spanish got it right. Spelling should definitely be based on the actual pronunciation, and a "E" should be pronounced the same in any language that uses that sound.
Blimps with skins that are solar cells!! The bigger the blimp, the more solar power! I would definitely be interested in a silent, leisurely 9 hour flight from Pittsburgh to ... Pittsburgh.
the savings from traffic tickets alone would be worth it, huehuehue. na but for real, the view would be worth the time, and it's an even more interesting proposal for slower moving cargo.
@@deathcube2006 Just use them for west to east flights, following the prevailing winds. Sell tickets as "Pittsburgh to somewhere downwind within two days". You might end up in Great Britain or Boston, depending... They could be used for really slow west to east direction round the world flights... or deflated and shipped by rail back to the west... By now I hope you realize I was kidding. Didn't the 9 hour flight from Pittsburgh to Pittsburgh tip you off?
@@randomnumbers84269 Nothing would go wrong as long safety and training standards are kept. Look at aircraft carriers (USN and France). They've been running for over 50 years with no problems that I'm aware of.
@@bluk4rd What is that supposed to mean? Of course we'd know. When the Russian nuclear sub exploded, seismic readings from across Europe could triangulate the exact location in Russian waters. Putin threw everything he had at the accident, but even he couldn't keep the lid on it for more then a few weeks. And it didn't even leak radiation. If it had, the whole world would've jumped on it. That was 20 years ago. The amount of environmental data that is being collected right now for monitoring climate change is astronomical. Incidents on such a scale simply can't be kept secret.
I'm convince hydrogen is the way to go for air travel. Hydrogen fuel can be created via electrolysis. Yes, you lose some energy in manufacturing the fuel, but you gain most of the advantages of combustion engine aircraft in weight and energy density. If you use solar or wind as the method of generating the electricity to create the hydrogen fuel, you cut out all CO2 emissions from the picture entirely aside from construction of the facilities and aircraft. As a hydrogen plane flies, it converts hydrogen and oxygen into water. This water can be jettisoned in flight similar to modern aircraft. The main cost will be in the initial investment of infrastructure, but once it is up and running, we will be able to keep utilizing air travel that is, essentially, power by solar and wind using hydrogen fuel as a medium.
Yeah it could, hydrogen actually is a battery, since you can make it from water using green electricity.As battery technology goes, hydrogen is not efficient and wastes a lot of energy. But if you need high energy density at low weight for air transport,it could be worth the waste. In this way it would indirectly be an electric airplane.
Holy shit you weren’t kidding. I was ready to tell you why hydrocarbons are more energy dense, but I decided to actually look it up first, and hydrogen has 3-4x the chemical energy density of hydrocarbon fuels (not counting hydrogen fusion because that’s still 20 years away). I guess that should have been obvious because LH2 is a more efficient rocket fuel than LNG or RP-1.
@Eddie Hitler Dear Mr Hitler, currently we are moving over to a Hydrogen gas network here in the UK 20% blend with Natural gas and eventually ramping up to 100% by 2030. We're replacing the national grid with high density plastic piping and building green hydrogen manufacturing sites in Sheffield, Hull, and Liverpool. It's already happening baby don't fight the future, make love to it. Electricity is for losers, ain't nobody like a sparky loser, no way no how.
Hydrogen is the most inefficient ‘battery’ known to man. Expensive to produce, difficult to store, and far too volumous. It will never take off (pun intended). R
@Eddie Hitler The storage is the biggest problem but i think that's a comparatively easy fix when compared to batteries. Batteries are not only gay but also lame. I remember years ago reading about how snow can be used to store H2 along with Metal Hydrides and Tetralin.
It also took several flights to facilitate the crew change for her fancy yacht. So instead of flying herself and consuming 1 flight's worth of fuel she went on a PR stunt that consumed several flights' worth of fuel. Yay!
@@MrMattumbo the boat was going to make the journey without her anyway; and as she has made clear, she was making a point about the need for sacrifices (whether you agree with her strategy or not)
The thing about bridge high speed rails is that they require a lot of maintenance and are still prone to corrosion. If we're doing the tunnel railway, you have to remember oceans are very deep. You'll be fighting again the pressure of the ocean to crush the tunnel and the heat of the earth.
I agree, the only viable energy source that we could implement in the time we have before the damage we have done to the atmosphere is beyond the tipping poing (hopefully we already haven't reached the tipping point yet) is the wide spread use of thorium based fission reactors. It's a subject worth several in depth videos on it's own as thorium reactors not only don't have the problems uranium or plutonium reactors do but can even help get rid of the waste from the current crop of nuclear reactors.
@@Masu_Stargazer thorium reactors are relatively very much untested and literally only 2 prototypes exist in India, the concept and design of one is much safer then a usual uranium-235 reactor and theoretically can produce more power per kg in comparison to uranium-235 as well and being significantly abundant in the crust so its cheaper to mine and collect with less environmental impact that uranium mines do, and you usually don't have to enrich thorium as the nuclear reaction is triggered by a small plutonium source to shoot out more neutrons to start the reacton, however, uranium-235 fission reactors have been around for so long in comparison to thorium reactors and such claims of being better to uranium is still rather fictitious then in a high level of certainty and thorium reactors are significantly more expensive to make and is not very attractive in the capitalistic society we all live in. I would personally live to see the uprising of thorium reactors in replacement to uranium-235 reactors as they are carbon neutral if you forget about the enrichment and mining processes
@@robertszynal4745 Hyperloop is utterly farcical as is Elon, the first fatality due to his rickety rockets and we'll be all told that man just wasn't meant to venture out beyond the Earth you'll see. They haven't even built rescue devices into the things, why?
Elon is wasting his time on the trucks. He should be building electric rvs that have wind and solar charging. And that information will also help with his mars plans.
the recent discovery of a "room temperature" superconductor may be electric flights savior, once it's reliably stable and duplicatable. Plus the fact that a laser is involved with its functioning we may actually get flying vehicles with cool neon accents and under glow like so many scifi stories have shown us
I would have thought further development in power-to-gas would result in a more feasible solution. Rig it up to a fleet of windmills and burn all the fuel you want.
Cycle efficiency puts the ax to that as a primary system. The amount of land area needed to harvest wind or solar on the scale we need power at is already problematic. Throw in a 3-10x(?) bump from having to manufacture H2 or CH4? That said if you end up with a power glut some times of the day and run out of places to send it turning it into liquid fuel would be better than letting it turn into heat.
@@Bender13 the simplest solutions are often the best. I wouldn't suggest windmill to cable to plane directly tho' as it would be an awful shame if the wind stopped blowing mid flight.
@@benjaminshropshire2900 you just need to thing big. Really really big. I've done some maths. Airline industry (pre Covid) uses 100 billion tonnes of jet fuel per year. Jet fuel has 46 GJ / tonne. So that's 4600 billion GJ per year. Current offshore wind farms (worldwide) produce 23.1 GW. Apparently power to air can currently achieve 50% efficiency with methane, and 80% is believed to be feasable. If they crack 80% then that's 0.58 Billion GJ of fuel from offshore. So we only need to increase our offshore footprint by a multiple of 7900. Maybe this needs to be for a post fusion world!!!
@@Kirealta yes, a fairly dangerous gas is clearly superior to already existing clean burning liquid fuel like propane which has been powering vehicles for about 100 years and it's so clean burning that it's completely safe to run propane fueled engines in enclosed spaces.
@@Kirealta except the point that like i said in the comment you seem to clearly not read and understood that propane is clean burning enough to be run in enclosed spaces like warehouses and mines, but i have to question the intelligence of someone who starts insulting other peoples intelligence based off a single youtube comment as if that's an accurate way to measure that.
@@Kirealta so i attempted to troll you simply for trying to say propane might be better, then i take it that it's ok to assume your a complete dumbass unable to separate trolling from actual facts.
You have biofuels that are a drop-in replacement (cost: Lots of land, maybe rainforest), you have liquid hydrogen combustion and LNG combustion planes, and you have the potential for more efficient designs, like 10,000 passenger ekranoplanes, that allow you to carry more weight per thrust across oceans at slightly lower speed (Ekranoplanes don't work well unless they're huge relative to wave height). You can also bring back airships, which are quite well-suited to solar power. Any solution likely requires plane tickets that are several times as expensive as they are today, with the commensurate drop in demand.
@@RRW359 Yeah, and so they don't burn for long when they use kerosene. Hydrogen is actually even more energy dense. It just takes up a lot of space and requires cryogenics, but it is manageable. If you burn stuff with oxidizer, it is very powerful and short. But if you do it with atmospheric air with tiny fuel volumes in huge air volumes, it cam be stretched for much longer.
yep. One of the very few applications for it in transportation. The downside is that it burns crazy hot and can't be used in every turbine but right now companies seem to be working on mixing it 50/50 or so with kerosene to make it work; that's at least progress.
This is a perfect use case for Hydrogen fuel cells. They don't work for cars, but they could work for flying. Edit: Make that liquid Hydrogen, not fuel cells.
@@daloshea6723 burning hydrogen using ambient air creates NOx emissions from the reaction with the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Its a similar issue to cars running diesel. You'd need a shit ton of adblue
That wasn't actually the point. The trip across the ocean in the boat wasn't proposing transoceanic boat travel as a replacement for aircraft, it was demonstrating how impractical it is to participate in modern society without burning a lot of carbon.
The density of air is a Be-Atch. As a foiling boat designer, with hopes of either playing the 900x more dense water off that of the air, OR utilizing the wing in ground effect (tricx!) there could be other ways to get across an ocean with such operational efficiencies. But then again, we could also evacuate tubes or use the vacuum above our atmosphere to get from A to B on the planet too. E-tech is not the only way to improve "air" travel.
I remember reading when Greta then had the entire crew of that boat fly back home so it actually tripled the amount of total air travel for a publicity stunt. Please correct me (with source) if I'm wrong because that was awhile ago and I wasn't there.
My understanding was they carbon offset the flight of the crew back as they had to do so in order to get the boat back: apnews.com/article/be12be49011743daaa3646edb0de0b61
A small input from a scandinavian about flygskam and all that to add some context people in the US might not have: the european train networks are _very_ extensive and developed compared to the american one. If I need to get to any other city in Europe, I can probably find a train route or connection of routes to get me there in about a day while still paying less than a flight ticket would cost. Flying is faster as long as you're going from and to a major city, but once you factor in check-ins, check-outs, controls, boarding, etc, it's not _much_ faster, which is why a lot of people are starting to see it as unnecessary.
A great example of why we absolutely need a public transport train network in the US. Not only would it reduce emissions from unnecessary plane flights but also from cars, especially in cities like LA where the abysmal public transportation leads to thousands of cars sitting in traffic for hours everyday.
@@mckendreespringer5664 Very much so. I hope you get the ball rolling over in the USA; if your rails were updated with modern tech domestic transportation and freight could become both faster and cheaper, while vastly cutting down emissions.
Mr. Z. , That sounds like solar-poduced ammonia to me ; heck , that's what coastal-deserts are really for ! .😎 *Give my Quora Post a read at : "Is it possible to collect the Sun's energy in the Sahara Desert , and transport it to the northern countries ?"
VTOL changes everything. All the limitations you mentioned are seriously reduced. Up to 75% of the wing area is removed along with its weight, the entire undercarriage along with its weight. With six electric engines that rotate, all the control surfaces are redundant along with their weight. The combined reduction in weight radically changes every power and energy density equation.
What? you mean the Panoptigon lifestyle, like The Hunger Games, sure you can stay put but the 1% will rove around seeing the sights, whatever, just go crawl into a tiny house and sprout some seedlings and lower your expectations.
@@riggs20 But when Global Pandemic is gone, human nature will revert to its natural state. People love to travel, and if Zoom was as good as face to face, Facebook would have replaced bars and clubs.
One alternative for efficient air-travel over oceans is ekranoplan (aka Ground Effect Vehicles or GEVs for short). They use the ground effect to their advantage and are estimated to use about half the fuel of corresponding propeller aircraft. One compromise is that their max speed is about 65% of the current commercial jet planes, but that's actually not that bad. Another constraint is that they need mostly flat surface under them so ekranoplan flights over land are big challenge, but oceans are good that way. Just for reference: "The Soviet-built Lun-class ekranoplan had a range of 2,000km and a potential cruising speed at 550 km/h" and that was a plane from the 80s
That’s a great idea. I second to that. One possible alternative is a mixture of cooking oil and kerosene. I do hope the owner of this channel sees my comment containing multiple links. Another biofuel suggested by the owner of the channel in a pinned comment, if I remember correctly is algae.
Yes, but are you willing to go to Europe at 60 miles an hour (100kph). Not many people would be willing to take 10 times the airplane's trip time or pay 10 times the current 1st class airfare to go by airship. A ship can do the trip in 5 days at a reasonable cost per passenger, but steam ship lines went broke 60 years ago because they couldn't compete with jet airplanes.
@@aceroadholder2185 LOL they can improve on all those metrics also the high cost of air travel run under a government program is nothing unusual let actual businesses run it and you will be amazed.
@@Barskor1 If you can design a lighter-than-air craft that can cruise at 500 mph and carry hundreds of passengers, you may win the Nobel prize in something.
@@joesterling4299 You don't want it to be lighter than air just have a large portion of the weight compensated for and be something like a flying wing using that large surface area for lift as well as buoyancy.
I agree with your comment above. One possible way out of this is to synthetize fuels from renewable energy and then burn them or use fuel cells. This would be just a way of going through an energy buffer, from low density to high density. Energy is almost never the problem: it is usually a problem of power, density, load matching,...
For short travels in highly populated areas, no doubt. But here in Norway, building a thousand mile hyperloop in order to move a few thousand people every day, would be very overkill. Fun, but overkill. Efficiency probably means going slower and more comfortably. I don't understand why we're not talking about airships. Extremely safe, extremely efficient and extremely comfortable. But not fast and that's ok because we have the internet now.
You might want to look up some videos by Thunderf00t on Hyperloop... It's kind of impossible to build. High speed rail can't help either. Trains are very good on mid range, but that is still shorter than short range flights (over ground). There will be a huge sobering up after reality set's in. Fuel is simply too energy dense to be ever replaced, regardless how efficient your engines get.
Unfortunately because America is so developed now just buying the land to build the railroad is going to be $25 million a mile... and that's just in the countryside. In a city it could easily be $250 million a mile. That's one reason the California LA to San Frisco high speed rail at present will start in the middle of nowhere and go the edge of nowhere... a money making endeavor for sure.
Aceroadholder The city of LA owns all the streets and highways, just get rid of streets, or place the rail pylons on top of the streets, then no land needs to be bought.
Love your videos, Joe. One possible replacement for more climate-friendly and fuel efficient air transport is the old technology of the airship/blimp. They'll never travel nearly as fast as a jet plane, but they can carry large amounts of heavy cargo by air without the need for roads or airport runways for landing, and perhaps modern technology can get them to fly faster than freight trucking. I'd be curious to see an analysis of how much better an airship/blimp could be than a jet plane in terms of fuel efficiency. Lockheed Martin has developed a Hybrid Airship you can read about here: www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/hybrid-airship.html
Thanks Joe; informative as always. Worth mentioning is that jet fuel is NOT as energy dense as mentioned, but is thought to be so because it uses atmospheric oxygen to get the heat units. Doesn't matter by some analyses, but it does in that it's all about the atmosphere and how we're trashing it. As you mentioned as well.
@@hackerulroman Just a whole set of worries completely removed from my day to day life. It's liberating. I was worried that I would look weird...now I look at pictures of when I had hair and THEY look weird.
@@plutoniumshore I was thinking about the discomfort of the small spikes that grow shortly after it's shaved and I'm 15 so I don't think I could look my best shaved. Regardless, it's still tempting
The single biggest infrastructure change that we could make would be to alter our powerplants to burn hydrogen . This being produced from large-scale desert/ sea production complexes around the globe . The economies of scale involved would then bring the price of hydrogen down to a reasonable level for the air- transport industry . This would still be more difficult and expensive than using jet-fuel , but not undoable . Long-term , beamed-power may make electric airplanes practical as well . *To examine this subject in more detail , read my post # 2 at : quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-collect-the-Sun-s-energy-in-the-Sahara-desert-and-transport-it-to-the-northern-countries/
8:10 - This is true for larger aircraft, but most smaller airplanes are unable to dump fuel. This is true even for the 757, which can easily carry 220 passengers more than 4,200 miles! This is because the certified Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW) and Maximum Landing Weight (MLW) of these aircraft are close enough together where they would only need to circle for an hour or two in order to be light enough to land safely.
The whole video I was waiting for the hydrogen elephant in the room. And it didn't come. You could have shortened this video by spending one minute on "a battery's storage capacity is not high enough and the weight of a plane would be too high, but hydrogen would work..." Why is anyone even thinking about batteries when hydrogen is the obvious (and as I see ONLY) solution for CO2 neutral(long haul) flights. Plus it could be produced locally at airports just using electricity. Something most airports have access to...
Because our current methods for refining hydrogen fuels at the industrial scales needed for this application produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to defeat the entire purpose of using the hydrogen fuel. It could work some day but at the moment, we're at the limits of our engeneering capabilities. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but in raw usable form, its very rare on Earth.
@@chh4516 People have been trying to fix it, and there are cleaner means of refining Hydrogen, but the problem then is with scaling that (still extremely energy intense) method to the industrial size capable of supplying cost comparative fuel for the very high demand it would be taking on. Its complicated and there are many other videos on the subject if you're curious. Deff worth looking into. essentially you're dealing with a rocket equation type of situation.
@@petrapatia6395 but don't we refine hydrogen with electricity so the environmental problems are the same as with electric flying. Hydrogen could possibly be a green option but just like with electric flying we need to produce more green electricity
@@petrapatia6395 It sounds to me that the issue of scalability is one that can actually be addressed though*albeit by assuming mass adoption of renewables and their continuous improvements, whereas batteries seem like an impermeable wall. Aside from some miracle discovery in energy density for batteries my guess is that we'll have a good shot at massively upscaling hydrogen production as wind and solar become far more commonplace in the next decade.
I enjoyed the video but seriously, 'change your behavior' is the cop out answer to the question and using Gretta's sail across the Atlantic as a legitimate long-haul alternative is a bit silly (it was a PR stunt more than anything else). It's like saying the answer to the Cobalt video you made just being 'change your behavior and use less technology thus we use less cobalt'. Both are so integral to the modern world that really it's not a feasible alternative at all (at this stage). Why not discus innovations in jet technology and efficiency, lighter plane designs requiring less fuel, engines that produce more thrust, better plane aerodynamics ect. I enjoy your renewables spin (hence watching your vids), but sometimes you've gotta give it to fossil fuels are simply indispensable within some industries for the foreseeable future and maybe explain that if we can't simply innovate our way to a new solution we should focus on better improving what we currently have.
@To Release is To Resolve - If everyone would go low tech enough to stop global warming... problem solved, but you have to participate. We are not going to do it all without you. Oh, and BTW, low tech farming may not grow enough food for 8 to 10 billion people.
Hydrogen powered aircraft are a zero emissions possibility like the Skylon. Compressed hydrogen has far better energy density by weight and density than batteries.
@@jeremymenning56 Electrolysis and compression process may be done without emissions using renewables energy sources. However, this method isn't the most efficient one considering the energy needed.
This is actually doable, but the production of that hydrogen fuel needs to come from far cleaner industrial scale refinement processes than what is currently scaled. Otherwise you're emitting CO2 to avoid emitting CO2... defeating the purpose.
Liquid Hydrogen tanks weigh less, which is important with aircraft. Hydrogen has double the energy density of any other carbon based fuel, because Hydrogen weights half of what everything else does. Hydrogen has no Neutron!
Our best strategies for dealing with aviation right now, as far as I know: Don't;s of individuals * Don't fly/travel at all unless it is a truly crucial flight/trip * Don't fly unless that is the most environmentally friendly option * When you fly, don't do so for a single reason, only to go back as soon as your main reason for the flight/trip is over Do;s of individuals * Do travel for important occasions and job opportunities, and for vacation if you want to but do so more often by not having to travel or travel not as far * Do choose the most environmentally friendly option you can find that is within your travel budget * When you fly/travel, do make the flight/trip well worth it, visit people you know and love that are in the area or just fly/travel for those occasions, visit neighbouring countries if you are on vacation et.c. Do;s of society and the transportation network/industries * Do electrify the most common short flights * Do invest in reforestation, forest protection and CCS for carbon sequestration * Do convert the aviation industry to sustainable aviation fuel made from biofuel and/or vegetable oils, alternatively hydrogen fuel cells * Do invest in electric train networks, hopefully, the really speedy ones, alongside renewable energy
And were do you plan to get that from? Should we build chicken farms to make diesel from chicken fat or maybe directly use food producing areas to make diesel? What is the plan? And just forget about ethanol. You need to put in more enegery in the process than you get out from it. Btw, jet engines runs on kerosene.
Look at an energy density scale. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel occupy the highest energy density to volume ratio of any standard fuel sources. They are at the top of the pile. Here's the rough list of energy densities from least dense to most dense (with some variation, considering that some of these are fuels and some of them are solids and their method of energy usage is different): 1. Batteries 2. Compressed Hydrogen Gas 3. Cooled Liquid Hydrogen 4. Compressed Natural Gas 5. Methanol 6. Ethanol 7. Liquified Natural Gas 8. Compressed Propane 9. Gasoline 10. Biodiesel 11. Aviation Gasoline 12. Jet Fuel 13. Diesel Biodiesel might be an option if you can produce it efficiently and at low cost, can store it effectively, and it won't have serious long-term effects on engines. All of which are difficult problems for Biodiesel. Ethanol is 33% less efficient than Jet Fuel, so that's probably a non-starter in the same way that batteries are a non-starter for large aircraft. Hydrogen fuels are interesting. While they have an energy density volume of about 25% of gasoline (1/4 of the energy per liter of fuel, at best), they have a weight of around 40% of gasoline (2.5 times lighter). While weight is an important factor, volume is also very important when dealing with aerodynamic systems like aircraft. To get roughly the same energy capacity for a hydrogen plane as one powered by just gasoline (not the more efficient jet fuel), while retaining the same weight in fuel, about 60% more room would be needed for fuel that could no longer be used for passengers or cargo. You also have to spend energy to cool and compress hydrogen, whereas jet fuel requires no meaningful energy to store.
@@jomen112 And the ethanol energy argument is an old disproven one! You definitely get more out; it's like saying you can't use gasoline because of the transport costs!
Joe: "Global warming is extremely dangerous and we need to act right now because all our lives depend on it." Me: "What do you think about nuclear energy?" Joe: "eh"
Thing is, renewables are cheaper, and base load power issue is now being addressed by energy storage. There is still work to be done in bolstering the grid, but that doesn't seem too hard, relatively. Nuclear sounds great, but it's expensive, and there will always be the nagging issue is safe long term storage.... for hundreds, thousands of years. I'd rather deal with the downsides of renewables than nuclear
@@deansmits006 Also, when you answer Over There, try to include the TOTAL cost. Not the marginal cost of wind/solar, but the average cost. In addition, can you quote the cost which includes the storage and the grid expansion needed to make intermittent wind and solar dispatchable? Y'know, all those costs that low-carbon nuclear does not require.
I think that if we changed our habits of traveling and requirements it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Instead of limited vacation time being used to travel we just wouldn't have to worry about how long it takes vs now we're wasting what little time we have so fast as possible is ideal (this is just to fix the prop plane speed issue)
This has been done with rockets (electric pumps) The battery pack could be slung under the planes CoG and could have its own control surfaces to glide to an airport along the way. But why not just directly burning hydrogen? It can be produced electrically with solar power, and produces water when burned.
Hydrogen has plenty of its own problems. To start with it requires much stronger containment, and given that fuel storage on planes is generally within the wings there's not a whole lot of options for "thicker" without impacting flight performance. Its also significantly more dangerous when containment fails (ie: it goes boom a lot easier than jet fuel). And then of course there's the biggest problem: Producing it. Separating hydrogen out of water is a very energy-intensive process and that energy has to come from somewhere. In the long term once we're mostly or fully converted to non-carbon sources for grid power that might be OK, but in the short term, using hydrogen has a higher carbon output than just burning the fossil fuels and adding that much extra load on the grid isn't going to help us transition faster. Hydrogen fuel may well be part of our final energy solution, but for now there are too many hurdles to using it on any sort of large scale -- at least not cleanly (and that's the whole point, after all).
One idea I didn't hear you mention was in air refueling. Something like a hot air balloon, holding a drone carrying batteries, perhaps being charged via solar when not in use, swaps batteries with the main flight unit mid air.
Nice shirt! So, the solution is to basically have the aviation equivalent of having an EV like a 2012 VW eGolf for your local trips/commute and a 2008 diesel VW Passat (pre-"Dieselgate") for longer trips. Maybe high-speed rail, but that requires significant infrastructure to be built (here in Texas, and the USA in general. Although one is in the planning stages here). So, electric airplanes for shorter commuter flights and traditional kerosene (jet fuel) high-bypass turbofan "jets" for trans-continental and trans-oceanic flights. Avoiding the mention of Musk's iPads-on-wheels deliberately. IMHO those are made for the masses (and deep pockets), not driving enthusiasts (with limited budgets). But, that's a whole other soap box for another day.
So there are several things that didn't end up in this video that are worth mentioning. Things like hydrogen fuel cell planes and carbon neutral jet fuel from algae or direct air capture. There are also specific plane designs that are noteworthy like the Blackfly (www.opener.aero/) and Lilium (lilium.com/).
Also, NASA just released some cool features on their electric X-57 Maxwell: ua-cam.com/video/1N7vYXwBJQ8/v-deo.html
Then there's the laminar flow designs of planes like the Otto Aviation Celera 500l ua-cam.com/video/CN4EKZHYVaE/v-deo.html
Basically, this video only scratches the surface. Anything else you think is relevant please share in the comments. :)
I saw Qantas, the Australian airline has started using bioAVGAS in small proportions on some of their flights.
There is no such thing as Carbon neutral jet fuel. Your fooling yourself with bookkeeping. It containes carbon. Hydrogen does not. Jet engine can be designed to run on Hydrogen. Liquid Hydrogen has Twice the energy density of any carbon containing fuel, half the weight at takeoff. Aircraft design point will change with Liquid Hydrogen powered planes to accommodate the increase in internal volume required, but it's not a big deal. Liquid Hydrogen Powered aircraft will look different than today's commercial aircraft because fuel tanks will be larger.
Electrically powered air ships would be SO AWESOME!
What about hybrid planes. Use a fuel based engine to charge batteries and use that to run the props. Does this same problem exist in that situation.
@Wuanslm: No because you need 4 times the amount of hydrogen than Kerosene to produce the same amount of energy. Plus it can only be stored in the fuselage unless you want boom.
Hey Joe,
Big fan of the channel, but this my first time commenting because it's a subject I have at least a little bit of expertise in, unlike pretty much any other video you've done.
I'm currently sitting at home as a stay at home dad because I've been furloughed from American Airlines, where up until October 1st I was a first officer operating the Boeing 737. Overall I really enjoyed the video, and as you yourself mentioned, it's a huge topic that there's much more to say about. Perusing the comments there seems to be plenty of good ideas out there for reducing our carbon footprint and I'm glad to see it, I think it would be amazing (and the right thing to do for our children) if by the time I retire the airline industry was at least primarily operating on renewables. There's just a couple things I want to mention that I don't think anyone else has.
1. You mentioned smaller electric aircraft as a solution to shorter routes. There are several issues with this, many of which are probably evident, but one of the things that stands out to me is the lack of infrastructure. If you replace regional jets that haul ~90 people with small electric jets that haul 9, then you have 10 times as many planes to deal with to move the same amount of people. This means 10 times as many pilots (or still 5 if you want to operate single pilot, but that's a whole other subject), far more ramp personnel, gate agents, space taken up at airports, etc. The ability of the airport and ATC to handle that amount of aircraft is wildly inadequate, and even if you move a lot of the smaller aircraft out to smaller satellite airports, the ATC system and the airspace it's self would quickly become completely overwhelmed. Over time we could potentially adjust towards this, but it's such a massive undertaking I'm quite sure that solutions towards alternative fuels for larger aircraft will occur first.
2. You mentioned aircraft taking off heavy and dumping fuel in the event of an emergency. This isn't really the case anymore. There are some relics flying around that can and will dump fuel, but the vast majority of aircraft operated by US airlines these days have no fuel dump capability. It isn't worth the danger or liability, and even if you dump into the ocean, the environmental impact. The modern solution to being overweight is simply to run an overweight landing checklist to prepare, and minimize the impact on the landing gear. After landing the aircraft is taken out of service and the gear is inspected for any damage before being used again.
you sir, deserve more likes
Take my like!
I think the answer to 1. was we fly a lot less to start with and its actually a far easier proposition to automate flying than self driving cars. However, even then the economics don't stack up. Airline economics mean the aircraft in the air as much as possible - but recharging will always be an issue even if the batteries were ideal you'd need to draw Megawatts from the grid and that won't work. Then I think the issue of weight is almost insurmountable, weight is the enemy of any locomotion but for aircraft its a much bigger issue because you need more lift which then scales the drag. Drag is basically where all your fuel goes. So- not going to work no matter what you do.
@@dr_jaymz Perhaps it's feasible to set up a bullet train network across America and Canada (reaching up to Alaska, of course) and then have conventional jets for long-range (like NY-Anchorage or to cross the oceans) or urgent trips (those would be the ones that deliver supplies to remote areas or send personnel in case of emergencies).
Manhattan Island would be a good example, many rules on where helicopters can land, travel along the water etc. Now they think 10,000 personal flying devices can be used in the same airspace. The first 10 accidents would end that dream.
A follow-up on electric boats/ships would be great. Love you Joe
Obviously they'd sink once they run out of Power...
@@Mexalen81 Electric boats (at least major ones) are like minor power plants that usually can create electricity in multiple ways. So, no, they'd not sink, check the examples of them, they are very solid.
@@fikretyet if they are solid, they'd sink even faster.
Also, hydrogen powered fuel cell as back up power. Making fuel right on the boat that use electrolysis to separate hydrogen for power and use the by product water to for showers and sinks.
@@fikretyet I think your chain is being yanked.
high speed trains solve 50% of the problem. Without having to go to the airport at both ends it's just as fast.
Exactly but you have to make sure the stations are in the heart of the city's financial and tourist district where people actually want to go to, and that adds a lot to the up front cost. The temptation to go cheap and have the station on the outskirts is very high, however self-defeating. Also you have to resist the temptation to have many stops at minor points on the way, no matter how much local politicians push for it, and ideally you have to give the high speed train its own dedicated rail line so it's not slowed down by slower other traffic.
@@IrishCarney I nice example is the 431 km trip between Amsterdam and Paris, it takes you from the center of Amsterdam to the centre of Paris in 3 hours and 20 minutes for 20 euros (if you reserve early). A flight is still shorter, including going through customs, checking in etc but by a small margin and generally more expensive.
But there's so much weirdos and groomers in trains lmao.
@@IrishCarney most train stations already are in the centre of the cities/most cities more than 60-70 years old HAVE train stations right in the central business/tourism/socializing hub. The hard part of the infrastructure (obtaining all that expensive downtown real estate) is, for the most part, already done.
@@HappyMarshmallowGamingComedy what
Not only do I want a flying car, I want it to make the Jetson sound.
And collapse down into a briefcase
James Purcer - Elon will do that for you if you accept the sound effects in your headphones only w/ an auto-cutoff whenever ATC or co-pilot is on the comm...
Besides to keep in-cabin noise down w/o extra weight, noise-cancelling electronics should be used to the max - global in cabin & individual headphones (w/ mics for conversations); pilot’s headphone and has ~4 voice activated channels - talk to devices, ATC/copilot, copilot/flt-attendant, or all in aircraft (add a channel if you’re the Purcer...) 😏
@@mikemccarthy1638 , that rank is spelled Purser. Have a good flight!
Damn it might make sense but without the vocal chords. 😬 😷
This comment is correct
Physics: Ruining everything since t=0*
*±10e−43 seconds
@Melvi Vanilly hes saying that physics has ruined since 0.000...043 seconds after the big bang because modern physics seems to tap out in meaning to any time before that.
@@MrDeathtower sorry I’m advance for being a dick but it’s 0.0000....1 not 0.0000...43
I’m not sure you can just reverse the math for black holes and say therefore it started with a Big Bang. Pretty darn good hypothesis.
Nerdiest answer of the night.
@MrDeathtower "10e−43" actually means "10⁻⁴³" when someone doesn't know how or doesn't want to bother to use the proper characters. It is not 0.0…43 but 0.0…01. 43 is the number of zeros.
Calling liquid fuel "gas" never stops to amaze me
hahahahaha i duuno why but this cracked me up. thanks man. needed that
I fully say Gasoline pretty often but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue that well lol
⛽ gasoline. Oil that turns to a gacious form passively and easily.
In the UK we call gasoline petrol.
Calling Petrol and Diesel ‘gas’ as if they’re the same thing never stops to amaze me too.
I've been developing a model plan that uses rubber band technology which has promising results.
Performance can be quite good, but flight times and passenger capacity could stand improvement.
Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me.
Perhaps you could be more flexible in your design approach.
"Prime" example of technology, I see what you did there. [4:27]
And also at 4:08, could have used "to get it of the ground", such a missed opportunity
people: complaining about airplane
ME: don't even make enough money to fly.
Wasting time listening to this idiot is sure to help.
That is one solution to climate change, you make the general public poor enough that they can't afford to consume that many resources.
@@jeffk464 but think how many other ways "poor" people fuck up their climate, just look at China and india
@@jeffk464 Booo to your edit, you chickened out.
@@neogeo1670 China is not poor. In my lifetime I went from hearing about how you couldn't throw away food because there were poor kids starving in China to as an adult seeing most of the US government budget being financed by borrowed money from China. Pretty amazing.
Ads in future going to be crazy:
"A bath will take you places"
"Remember to flush as you alight."
"flygskam" is pure propaganda here in Sweden I have never heard a person use that word in an organic fashion IRL
Majority of people doesn't like what you did.. Well that's sounds socialist
Using that word to shame people because they want to travel because maybe they want to see their love ones is just plain stupid
Just innovate and the idea of short flight with electric planes are great but long duration flight.. I don't know how they're going to solve that
@@grayscale888 solid state batteries. First car slated to use solid state is 2024 roughly. Much higher energy density and charges in seconds. Also much lighter.
@@davidbeaulieu4815 I'll believe it when I see it.
@@kennethhawley1063 well like everything else it'll probably be delayed but they're already starting to use them in phones
@@davidbeaulieu4815 solid state batteries are still about 10 times less energy dense than jet fuel. The only solution I see feasible is hydrogen fuel cells but storage will be an issue.
The electric planes just need an on-board, coal-fired electric plant.
Problem. Solved.
Or nuclear.
Wind energy, it's basically a perpetuum mobile
@@MrGonzonator r/whoosh?
@@mjaysaratchandra8196 yes, that is approximately the sound it would make as it flew overhead.
The small scale modular fission reactors could get small enough to solve the main power problem, but in a unmanned taxi ? What drunken annoyed with the world idiot is going to try and fiddle with the power source, same reason I don't like slushy Hydrogen tanks on anything near my fellow man to be honest I have trouble with trusting many people with petrol.
I think a Chinese lab was able to develop an electric jet engine. It's tiny and inefficient, but it's also the first. The team is deliberating how they can improve the design and potentially make it viable.
They're called EDFs (electric ducted fan) and model planes have been using them for years. The electric plasma jet engines from china are just silly.
@@jsn1252 EDF is a dead end. The airspeed is so much slower than Chinese electric bullet trains that are already running all over the place. There's no reason for EDF powered airliners to exist, even assuming battery weight problem is solved. Electric plasma jet airliners at least have a reason to exist, if not worth the effort.
"Change our behaviour" before the catastrophe? What species are you talking about?
Homosapiens? You know, your distant relative?
2020 show us we can't agree to put on a simple face mask for the sake of the species, so, yeah... doomed... 😥
Ruben de León I know. Next thing you know, Trump followers will stop showering to help "build their immune system" *facepalm*
@To Release is To Resolve Yeah they should be like the people during the early civil rights movement, making sacrifices (Montgomery bus boycotts, Sit in beatings, Loss of amenities) you can't just hector everyone into changing behavior without doing it your self, Greta's sail across the Atlantic is a good example but yeah, td;lr sitting here on the internet being angry won't help anyone so just serve a good example for your community
The one that goes :yeah your grandpa drove his entire family in a gogomobile, but. Suv entrance is so comfy. We need it.
On the topic of drones. I would love to see something on the automation of farming. Crop dusters, automated planters and harvester, logistics. It would be neat to see more about what’s in the pipeline in this area. Love the channel, keep up the amazing work!
Need a 2nd video on this, as you state Joe to cover the points you didn't cover like Hydrogen (burning or fuel cell - and what the difference is), and exactly at what point the energy density per KG and volume would be required before 'larger' plans could be used. You can forward predict that based on the trajectory of battery improvements over the last 10 years or so (if looking at Li-ion).
Its always good when content leads to more content, keeps the viewers engaged 🙂
45-90 times. Batteries would need to hold 45-90 (lets call it 70) times more power per kg to equal the energy density of current jet fuel. However, that does not take into count the efficiency current jet powered aircraft gain as a flight goes on and they burn fuel (and reduce their weight).
Once you overcome that issue, you will then need to reinforce the landing gear for the added landing weight (since the battery weight doesn't change in flight). That will add even more weight that will now require more battery power to compensate for.
That takes you to the one problem that almost everyone that wants electric airplanes forgets... propellers have a speed problem. Once the tips start to break the speed of sound, the shockwave they produce prevents them from pushing air. That is why you don't see many prop aircraft (not counting WWII fighters) going much more then 350 knots.
The problem with Hydrogen falls into two categories. Using it as a straight replacement for jet fuel is a no-go. Jet fuel is a lot more energy dense than Hydrogen. Same reason you would not use it to run an ICE car.
The fuel cell would work better than batteries (i.e. less weight) but would still run into the same problem with the props.
Also, Hydrogen has one other tiny problem... storage space. By the time you loaded enough Hydrogen into a 737 size aircraft to fly from LAX to Denver, you would not have any space left for PAX or cargo.
@@jarheadcharlie2315 Some good points but despite 45-90 times being quite a wide margin, I don't think it's correct as I believe that figure refers to the absolute energy density of fuel compared to a battery but it doesn't account for the efficiency of the engine and its ability to convert the fuel to work.
ICE isn't brilliant at typically around 30% but I believe jet engines have significantly improved over time with some as high as 50% (when looking at overall efficiency), but that doesn't compare favourably to electric motors of over 90% and hence that figure changes to just 4 or 5 times in a car.
Ok, to your other points (and the reason a 2nd video needs to go into more detail showing the proposed future tech engines and how they work), yes if you run what would be a highly efficient electric 'turbo prop' style engine you will be limited in speed in the same way turbo props are now, but the future hybrid hydrogen turbo fan electric engines seek to overcome those issues. The compressor part of the engine runs from battery electric (recharged from a fuel cell since you're carrying some hydrogen anyway) and then a small amount of hydrogen is injected and 'burned' to get the jet effect. Hydrogen has around 3 times the energy density of jet fuel but less than 3 times the volumetric density so you're probably are redesigning your fuselage and wings to equate performance, and that's no small task, but it doesn't prevent hybrid Hydrogen engines replacing jet fuel burning engines in the future. The whole technology, problems and considerations around it is quite interesting.
Maybe Joe could have done 2 videos, one explaining the problems and another with potential solutions a bit like the Going to Mars is a good idea/bad idea videos. A colab with Tim Dodd might have been a good idea too due to his work describing the differences +/- when using hydrolox engines compared to kerolox etc.
It's simple: Storing and releasing energy in chemical form, regardless if burning stuff or discharging a battery, is basically a RedOx reaction.
Batteries are doomed by having to carry both fuel and oxidizer with them for the whole journey. Fossil fuels have to carry only the fuel, and can dump even that overboard once it's spent.
In a mode of transport whose efficiency is directly tied to weight, that makes electric propulsion a non-starter, except for some specialized niches.
Clearly creating chemical fuels that can burn atmospheric oxygen and are produced in a carbon-neutral way are way more promising.
Batteries are improving energy density at a rate of about 4% a year since lithium ion entered the market which is pretty fast. It might not replace jet engines but will quickly replace piston engines.
@@JD-yx7be Still doesn't solve the pricipal dilemma explained above. With piston engines you can reap the benefit of the electric motor being much better adapted, though that works even better for wheel bound vehicles. But you still have to take the oxydizer along for the ride.
That sounds like hydrogen to me. Although the way fuel is stored inside a wing is going to be insufficient for hydrogen storage. Another idea would be to make a bio version of jet fuel, if possible.
Edit: Seems like there already exists bio jet fuel:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel
So it's just a matter of financing and the willingness of companies to support it.
Elon musk is planning to turn atmospheric co2 into methane for the starship using solar power
@@captainahab5522 That works, but to produce enough solar fuel for the kind of energy wasting we do on Terra will require ridiculous amounts of real estate. What can work for a martian colony may not scale for earths population at large.
Someone needs to change these “laws” because they seem to cause more issues.
I'm sure Biden thinks that'd work.
@@snek9353 no, it would have to be Trump. His mental state has been declining recently and he is embracing his inner Karen by filing lawsuits. He’s also a loser sooo...
@@chimoshi3393 Wow, sadly Asch was right.
You could always write your local transreality representative about the issue.
@@snek9353 What part of "Nothing will fundamentally change" makes you think Biden thinks he's a wizard?
8:55 I feel this incorrect. A prop engine will never be more powerful than a jet engine. The issue with that is, you can only turn a propeller so fast before the tip of the propeller reaches the transonic phase, after which you begin to create drag the faster you turn that prop. Adding an electric motor won’t change that since at the end of the day; whether you’re flying a piston engined plane from the 40s, or you’re flying a brand new electric plane, the fact of the matter is that a jet engine’s ability to compress air and then combust it will forever be it’s advantage when relating to “power”.
Leonardo Da Vinky in a nutshell: I'm four parallel universes ahead of you but I'm held back by the technology of my time.
Edit 1: Had to change Da Vinci to Da Vinky for obvious reasons
Turns out we have been chasing his afterimage this whole time
@@NuclearTopSpot lol
da vinky?
@@_swesters_ omg I'm such an uncultured human I forgot to type Da Vinky. Thanks mate for reminding me
One thing that has bugged me. The reactions of people who don’t understand forward thinking, and by that being a thing, the real question is.... has that hesitation to believe in people like da Vinci when they are alive benefited us, saved us or left us in the dust?
every time joe says "we" just substitute the 1% who is actually flying frequently and creating all the pollution. "we" normal people only fly on average maybe once a year at most.
the average is still only about 2 per year per person. Of course roughly 50% of the population doesn't fly at all, so you have a small minority that flies a ton and makes up the difference.
Actually, much less for many. I used planes for maybe 4 trips in may life. Once every decade.
To blame the rich when the 3/4 of the plane seats are the "cheap" ones is over reaching. A lot of people travel coz its part of their job. Or at least it was before the pandemic.
@@alexforce9 Interesting point. However, I'd like to mention that the "rich" are the reason that flying is so cheap. The airline doesn't make any money from coach; all the profits come from first and business class; the economy passengers are just there to offset the cost of fuel. If the rich weren't flying then many more people would be completely unable to afford flying at all. Which I guess would be a "good" thing from the perspective of the video, but it would suck from the perspective of a normal person wanting affordable travel. Since most environmentalists are elitist snobs (or just clueless), I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are OK with air travel being "reserved" for the wealthy.
@@alexforce9 It's also significantly safer to fly than drive. Those "short distance" flights, we do a lot, 700 some miles instead of driving, takes under half a day vs a long ass day and...
...must less chance of dying than if we drive that far
"Ya canna change the laws of physics, Jim!"
But you can understand them better to know where the loopholes are.
But twisting them pretzel shaped is usually good enough.
We need a Scotty and a wrench... 😊
Great video, as always. Just a small thing that bugged me in your explanation. Common airliners are actually designed to take off at a weight that's higher than the maximum allowed landing weight. This allows the landing gear to be designed to withstand lower loads and hence reduces the dry weight of the aircraft. Emergency landings right after taking off when you're full of fuel are relatively rare, so dumping excess fuel every now and then ends up being cheaper and more fuel efficient in the long term. If it's any consolation, there's huge cleanup fines that airlines need to pay if they have to dump fuel and this goes towards cleaning up the mess that dumping creates. There also dedicated dumping zones near every major airport so that the fuel will not affect a vulnerable habitat or be dumped on buildings.
In the case of electric planes, since batteries do not lose weight over the course of the flight as you correctly stated, the landing gear will be designed using the full weight of the aircraft in mind. The electric aircraft will therefore not be less safe if it needs to land shortly after taking off, since this mass will be the mass the aircraft was designed for.
Just wanted to clear things up a bit :). Great video as always
Full self driving cars will replace a lot of short haul air flights, as you can get in your car, turn on fsd, and onward you go.(Edit, corrected spelling)
Joe: "the problem with electric airplanes is they have a top speed of only 300mph"
Also Joe: *acts as if sailing ships are an alternative*
Well, blimps exist, but ...
He was saying we are just going to have to go slower.
@@BadOompaloompa79 Why though when we could just produce liquid fuels that are carbon neutral? The human race never goes backwards by choice and never will.
@@filonin2 I would consider people having the time and awareness of the consequences enough to travel slower a step forward for humanity not a step back.
Only the important people should be allowed to fly
Hydrogen is arguably a pretty good solution to this
OK argue it.
Hydrogen offers much higher energy density than batteries, though I don't know the figures offhand. I expect that jet propulsion may also be possible. There are safely issues of course, but perhaps no worse than with jet fuel.
We had bad history with hydrogen (I mean giant balloons turning into massive balls of fire are great example of that), but the main issue I think would be the cost of fuel production and transport of it. Which probably will not be as bad choice when fossil fuels will be finished (unless we start the third war for the Antarctica's oil - which probably will happen, but we can only pray that it won't), unless we will finally reach a new breakthrough in the batteries department.
Can't tell if joking or stupid
@@Number_Free Depends on your definition of density: energy per mass, sure but not energy per volume. Problem is that hydrogen is a gas. Gases take a lot of space. Or you have to do with a lot of isolation and cooling to liquify it, which adds to weight again. Also hydrogen has that safety problem, see the Hindenburg disaster.
With the weight argument you also need to consider efficiencies. A jet engine might be 30% efficient which means 70% of the fuel and its weight is not used for forward propulsion but instead gets wasted as heat. 70% of the energy carried in the fuel is therefore dead weight. An electric motor might be 95% efficient. Most of the energy stored in the cells is used for forward propulsion.
DAMMIT JOE HYDROGEN !!!! WHY YOU FORGET HYDROGEN!!!
Fr tho
@Chris Van Bekkum I hope hydrogen will get cheaper.
@Chris Van Bekkum see i used to be like you then I remembered third world countries and emergency response vehicles and military vehicles. Good luck finding a place to charge your electronic truck in a enemy nation. Hydrogen can be moved its liquid electricity. It doesn't matter that its expensive to produce the benefits outweigh the costs which will drop as more suppliers come online.
Hydrogen blimps for Amazon and delivery drones would be the only solution I see working. It saves on electricity usage as long as it isn't windy, and can greatly increase the weight able to be carried.
@Chris Van Bekkum You sure? - www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zeroe.html
And before you argue the production of - www.japan.go.jp/tomodachi/2020/earlysummer2020/hydrogen.html
I'm an airline pilot that burns tonnes of gas per hour. The strangest company memo I've seen was "we need to save the trees, please recycle paper", so yeah.
The best thing you can do is follow the most fuel efficient flight profile. Get to the next gate 15 minutes slower, don't hurry, long gliding descents instead of maintaining given altitudes. A bit slower ascent to max cruising altitude........
That’s the Quarter-Pounder ‘n Diet Coke effect.
I am a glider pilot. Have you tried switching off the engines, popping out the Ram Air Turbine and thermalling? I guess you won't have enough power for the onboard entertainment system but you gotta sacrifice something.
@@paulmakinson1965 No, they usually point the nose down into a high speed dive to get to the runway as soon as possible. That's why it's so noisy in the back with all the air rushing by when descending.
Sasquatch sized carbon footprint....
"Drones are electric". Yeah and the biggest concern you have when flying one is worrying about the battery
Uh, no.
@@TexMex421 Uh, yes. I've owned 2 drones and watching the battery level is in the top 2 things you do.
@@bigglyguy8429 And the anxiety, when it starts beeping because it dropped to 10%...
Doubled down if wind changed and not only you are not anymore returning on it, but rather against it, but it's also stronger...
Particularly scary it is, when you are standing on the observation platform on a solitary high rock above and in middle of the forest...
Ironically the first "drone" was a Nazi revenge weapon that used a jet engine. V1 "BuzzBomb"
@@theq4602 The concept of drones dates back to 1849, when Austria attacked Venice using unmanned balloons stuffed with explosives. Austrian forces, who were besieging Venice at the time, launched around 200 of these incendiary balloons over the city.
The British were using pilotless aircraft in 1916, and radio controlled fixed wing aircraft in the 1930s.
As an airline pilot I really enjoyed the video and was impressed by the depth of knowledge. One thing that I would add for thought; The engines also serve an additional purpose beyond the production of thrust. In bad weather we use hot air ducted from the engines to prevent ice from forming on the wings and other critical areas. So an alternative to ice prevention would need to be worked out. There are other forms of deice/anti-ice, liquid (weeping wings), phenumatic boots, but these are not practical for use on jets. Electricity is used to heat probes and windows but to power the electric heat elements draws a lot of electric power. There is definitely a lot to overcome.
"HYDROGEN !!!"
You still have to convert about 1/3 of the plane to hydrogen tanks (less cargo and passengers) .. but beside that: yes, probably 😉
Or natural gas
Or literally any other combustible fuel that is CO2 neutral or at least less bad than fossil fuels. For example: bio-fuel or synthetic fuel.
@@andrewlitvinov7266 exactly
@@snygg1993 that still leaves space for 100 passangers or so. Better then 9 in the Eviation...
One might say, Amazon is having trouble getting it’s drone delivery service “off the ground”.
Although, I'm about 5 miles from one of their DC's so sure, send a drone for my 3 pound item and drop it in my backyard instead of driving the van over.
Yes, he made this exact joke in the video -_-
Google wing is operating in Australia pretty well.
Long live burrito drone!
Thanks for another great video, Joe!
Answering your question: nobody wants to pay for the expensive infrastructure for high-speed railways, but, inside big countries like Russia, Canada, China, the USA, Brazil, Australia, and India, that's probably the one single best option for fast transportation. China had an early start on that, but the others seem to be taking their time. Since most people can't go back to the old ship cruising days, I guess that's another topic that environmentalists will have to push hard for.
I am ok with the trip taking longer as long as I can sleep and use the internet.
the u.s. already has a plane network that can get people to anywhere with an airport in a few hours with any railway infrastructure mostly being used for freight if it's not abandoned track, and that's assuming the unused abandoned track wasn't ripped up yet.
@@skarloey2334, those are facts and I agree with you, but I didn't really understand what was your point. Can you elaborate a little more?
People are willing to pay for infrastructure if it allows them to use a cheap, simple and fast transportation system.
Travelling by plane is expensive and travelling by car is slow.
Hybrid planes maybe a solution , planes have a large energy requirement to get to cruising altitude. If you electrified the plane engines. Use a jet engine to run a generator sized for cruise speed requirements and use capacitors or batteries to give the energy for the ground to cruise height requirements. Efficiencies with electric engine placements , composite materials, flying wing designs should allow long haul designs. Short haul can be met with battery tech improvements over the next 5 to 10 years. Military drove tech will give us pilotless planes further cutting weight. This would allow smaller planes that would be easier to electrify. Also the fuel efficiency of aviation fuel like most fuel burning is around 30%.
There is another viable position: keep aviation the way it is, and just electrify everything else. As you said, aviation is only 2% of global CO2 emissions. If that were all humanity's emissions, it's sustainable in the long run.
Not to mention the other alternative: liquid hydrogen instead of jet fuel. Jet engines can burn hydrogen very efficiently with little modification. The energy density of liquid hydrogen is pretty good, even considering the weight of the tanks. But aircraft need to be redesigned to have the tanks in the fuselage. There were flying prototypes of this in the 1950s.
Methane is more practical than hydrogen, due to having twice the volumetric energy density, and being the most practical of the hydrocarbons to produce from carbon dioxide.
@@absalomdraconis Burning Methane also has the advantage of transforming a massively worse greenhouse gas into a less bad one. And it can also be produced easily from human food and bio waste products. Assuming we can put in place the infrastructure to capture it instead of letting it leak into the atmosphere.
Keep in mind that water, released in the upper atmosphere, is a significant greenhouse gas. Don't assume that "It's just water, its fine". For water in the lower atmosphere, this might be true, but water in the higher atmosphere tends to stay there for long times, and given the amount of normal, precovid airtravel, going for Hydrogen significantly increases the amount of water vapor. Also Hydrogen cannot fullfill some of the task jet fuel fullfills in the engine, such as cooling and hydraulic actuation. There is more then just "releasing heat" that a fuel has to do to be suitable.
@@GermanTopGameTV Liquid hydrogen is one of the best coolants in existence - a jet engine could be easily modified to cool via fuel lines - just like what is done with liquid hydrogen rocket engines. I'm not sure if they needed this in the Tu-155 prototype, but it certainly flew:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155
Agreed - water in the stratosphere is a significant problem even with current airplanes - it traps solar heat better than CO2 does. However, back to my first point: if we tackle the easier global CO2 reductions first, air travel would become environmentally sustainable - even with additional water vapor.
@@absalomdraconis Yes, but Methane produces CO2. Slightly less than jet fuel does, but CO2 nonetheless. At least it solves the problem of where to source the fuel without the oil industry though.
I had no interest in the Dream the Future series until you said it was narrated by Sigourney Weaver.
Then it became a must-watch.
Signatory Weaving from Spook-Enders!? Wow now that's something, it's almost worth getting into debt over.
I get: This documentary is currently unavailable in your country
.
That helps.
Where's hyperloop at these days?
First test with a human passenger: www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/virgin-hyperloop-human-passengers-transportation/
HELL, I was cooking, so did I miss the part about Hyperloop or did he really not mention it?
Transcontinental... Ok, no solution there, but most flights are over land.... Right?
Had to scroll waaay too far for this
I am a big fan of railway journeys. I will happily take a 16 hour train journey than a 6 hour economy class flight. A train leaving early in the evening and reaching destination early in the morning would be the optimal use of my time and I will reach my destination well slept.
Off course, I am assuming several things like sufficiently comfortable sleeping arrangement and specific timings etc.
It used to be a thing all over Europe until the invention of Ryanair and untaxed fuel for airplanes.
What is wrong with a return to the graceful and elegant era of airships?
Art Deco with modern tech?
Sign me up friends!
Sounds great, but the economics don't work. For every Berlin to New York trip an airship could make one way a jet airliner could make 3 or 4 round trips carrying twice as many passengers. Air fare on the Hindenberg one way was ~$10,000 in today's dollars. It would be really nice to arrive at your destination relaxed and no jet lag though.
@@aceroadholder2185 Hindenburg was run by socialists as a show pony and made way too much effort at high-class BS gee I wonder why it was not cost efficient....?
@ebulating Hydrogen and nitrogen mixed are as effective as helium and low risk.
@@Barskor1 I don't think you know very much about the Zeppelin company. It was not run by socialists nor was the company a fan of the Nazi regime. The company today still isn't run by socialists.
@@aceroadholder2185 Hey Count Von Zeppelin are you part of the government? Why yes sir. Also when Hitler took over all businesses were nationalized with a universal union and so on....
I imagine Amazon using autonomous electric “aircraft carriers”. They would deliver packages to homes using drones. The drones return to the carrier to charge up a bit between deliveries. The carriers would drive to strategic locations and disperse the drones with their packages.
They've been doing it for years.
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-03/china-s-on-the-fast-track-to-making-uav-drone-deliveries
They've also been a cashless society for years. America is pretty much an antiquated backwater these days.
@@georgedang449 I imagine the "carrier" would be a large truck navigating through neighborhoods and delivering
Next: Cover cargo ships. That would be a lot more fun to talk about!!
That almost wound up in this video but it was too much of a side quest.
@@joescott Look into it. I think you'd be surprised with the amount of R&D going into that!
For the 1000km range, wouldn't trains be a far better alternative?
Edit: Okay, got to the end of the video where you answered this lol
For Melbourne: Just say “mel’ ‘burn” instead of “mel’ “born”. Semantics, I know.
Well, whoever invented the English spelling was raving mad. The Spanish got it right. Spelling should definitely be based on the actual pronunciation, and a "E" should be pronounced the same in any language that uses that sound.
I visited my cousin in Melbourne for a week, and I learned really fast they pronounce it like Mel-bin.
Everyone in Melbourne probounces it like this: Mel-born-ee
@@kindlin They call their city Melvin? 🤣
@@DonkeyDongs
To a spanish ear, maybe. To an american, those are 2 different names.
I agree even short haul flights switched to all electric like Harbour Air would be a good start.
Blimps with skins that are solar cells!! The bigger the blimp, the more solar power! I would definitely be interested in a silent, leisurely 9 hour flight from Pittsburgh to ... Pittsburgh.
the savings from traffic tickets alone would be worth it, huehuehue.
na but for real, the view would be worth the time, and it's an even more interesting proposal for slower moving cargo.
No, blimps only work with little or no wind. A small breeze can be catastrophic
@@deathcube2006 Just use them for west to east flights, following the prevailing winds. Sell tickets as "Pittsburgh to somewhere downwind within two days". You might end up in Great Britain or Boston, depending... They could be used for really slow west to east direction round the world flights... or deflated and shipped by rail back to the west... By now I hope you realize I was kidding. Didn't the 9 hour flight from Pittsburgh to Pittsburgh tip you off?
A battery is technically lighter when "empty" joe, same as a wound spring having more mass (potential energy} than a relaxed spring.
*Say it with me kids:*
Nuclear. Trans. Oceanic. Passenger. Liners.
Nothing can go wrong with that one?
@@randomnumbers84269 Nothing would go wrong as long safety and training standards are kept. Look at aircraft carriers (USN and France). They've been running for over 50 years with no problems that I'm aware of.
@@ivanfreely6366 as far as we know....
I'm down with that.
@@bluk4rd What is that supposed to mean? Of course we'd know. When the Russian nuclear sub exploded, seismic readings from across Europe could triangulate the exact location in Russian waters. Putin threw everything he had at the accident, but even he couldn't keep the lid on it for more then a few weeks. And it didn't even leak radiation. If it had, the whole world would've jumped on it. That was 20 years ago. The amount of environmental data that is being collected right now for monitoring climate change is astronomical. Incidents on such a scale simply can't be kept secret.
I'm convince hydrogen is the way to go for air travel. Hydrogen fuel can be created via electrolysis. Yes, you lose some energy in manufacturing the fuel, but you gain most of the advantages of combustion engine aircraft in weight and energy density. If you use solar or wind as the method of generating the electricity to create the hydrogen fuel, you cut out all CO2 emissions from the picture entirely aside from construction of the facilities and aircraft. As a hydrogen plane flies, it converts hydrogen and oxygen into water. This water can be jettisoned in flight similar to modern aircraft. The main cost will be in the initial investment of infrastructure, but once it is up and running, we will be able to keep utilizing air travel that is, essentially, power by solar and wind using hydrogen fuel as a medium.
Yeah it could, hydrogen actually is a battery, since you can make it from water using green electricity.As battery technology goes, hydrogen is not efficient and wastes a lot of energy. But if you need high energy density at low weight for air transport,it could be worth the waste. In this way it would indirectly be an electric airplane.
Holy shit you weren’t kidding. I was ready to tell you why hydrocarbons are more energy dense, but I decided to actually look it up first, and hydrogen has 3-4x the chemical energy density of hydrocarbon fuels (not counting hydrogen fusion because that’s still 20 years away).
I guess that should have been obvious because LH2 is a more efficient rocket fuel than LNG or RP-1.
@Eddie Hitler Dear Mr Hitler, currently we are moving over to a Hydrogen gas network here in the UK 20% blend with Natural gas and eventually ramping up to 100% by 2030. We're replacing the national grid with high density plastic piping and building green hydrogen manufacturing sites in Sheffield, Hull, and Liverpool. It's already happening baby don't fight the future, make love to it. Electricity is for losers, ain't nobody like a sparky loser, no way no how.
Hydrogen is the most inefficient ‘battery’ known to man.
Expensive to produce, difficult to store, and far too volumous.
It will never take off (pun intended).
R
@Eddie Hitler The storage is the biggest problem but i think that's a comparatively easy fix when compared to batteries. Batteries are not only gay but also lame.
I remember years ago reading about how snow can be used to store H2 along with Metal Hydrides and Tetralin.
Its a bit easy to take a racing sailing yacht trip when you dont have a timecrunch due to not having a job or being in school.
It also took several flights to facilitate the crew change for her fancy yacht. So instead of flying herself and consuming 1 flight's worth of fuel she went on a PR stunt that consumed several flights' worth of fuel. Yay!
@@MrMattumbo the boat was going to make the journey without her anyway; and as she has made clear, she was making a point about the need for sacrifices (whether you agree with her strategy or not)
The thing about bridge high speed rails is that they require a lot of maintenance and are still prone to corrosion. If we're doing the tunnel railway, you have to remember oceans are very deep. You'll be fighting again the pressure of the ocean to crush the tunnel and the heat of the earth.
Make thorium nuclear plants, all the other big energy dependent nations on it and then we go form there
I agree, the only viable energy source that we could implement in the time we have before the damage we have done to the atmosphere is beyond the tipping poing (hopefully we already haven't reached the tipping point yet) is the wide spread use of thorium based fission reactors. It's a subject worth several in depth videos on it's own as thorium reactors not only don't have the problems uranium or plutonium reactors do but can even help get rid of the waste from the current crop of nuclear reactors.
The Nasa invention have potential
@@Masu_Stargazer thorium reactors are relatively very much untested and literally only 2 prototypes exist in India, the concept and design of one is much safer then a usual uranium-235 reactor and theoretically can produce more power per kg in comparison to uranium-235 as well and being significantly abundant in the crust so its cheaper to mine and collect with less environmental impact that uranium mines do, and you usually don't have to enrich thorium as the nuclear reaction is triggered by a small plutonium source to shoot out more neutrons to start the reacton, however, uranium-235 fission reactors have been around for so long in comparison to thorium reactors and such claims of being better to uranium is still rather fictitious then in a high level of certainty and thorium reactors are significantly more expensive to make and is not very attractive in the capitalistic society we all live in.
I would personally live to see the uprising of thorium reactors in replacement to uranium-235 reactors as they are carbon neutral if you forget about the enrichment and mining processes
When the Cybertruck and the Semi are up and running smoothly, Elon will get right on that.
He already is. Hyperloop
@@robertszynal4745 Hyperloop is utterly farcical as is Elon, the first fatality due to his rickety rockets and we'll be all told that man just wasn't meant to venture out beyond the Earth you'll see. They haven't even built rescue devices into the things, why?
The Tesla semi will never be viable.
Elon is wasting his time on the trucks. He should be building electric rvs that have wind and solar charging. And that information will also help with his mars plans.
No Elon knows how to math
9:43 if the aviation industry only make around 2% of CO2 emissions, it means we have bigger fish to fry.
Exactly, 2.5% it doesn't seems that much for the humongous aviation industry
Actually 2% is a lot. Considering that the rest is made up of all of America's industry, agriculture and Transportation.
industries aside the whole thing comes down to we need a major keap forward in battery storage
And in terms of CO2 emission per mile planes are far worse than cars and trains, only being toped by cruise ships.
It's called ocean, if you talking about CO2. But Methane is much bigger problem. Kill cows?
the recent discovery of a "room temperature" superconductor may be electric flights savior, once it's reliably stable and duplicatable.
Plus the fact that a laser is involved with its functioning we may actually get flying vehicles with cool neon accents and under glow like so many scifi stories have shown us
Could we have 2021s motto be “Nothing going on in 2021”? I feel after this year the would could use a break.
I would have thought further development in power-to-gas would result in a more feasible solution.
Rig it up to a fleet of windmills and burn all the fuel you want.
Or .....has anyone thought of really, really, really long extension cords?
Cycle efficiency puts the ax to that as a primary system. The amount of land area needed to harvest wind or solar on the scale we need power at is already problematic. Throw in a 3-10x(?) bump from having to manufacture H2 or CH4?
That said if you end up with a power glut some times of the day and run out of places to send it turning it into liquid fuel would be better than letting it turn into heat.
@@Bender13 the simplest solutions are often the best.
I wouldn't suggest windmill to cable to plane directly tho' as it would be an awful shame if the wind stopped blowing mid flight.
@@benjaminshropshire2900 you just need to thing big. Really really big.
I've done some maths.
Airline industry (pre Covid) uses 100 billion tonnes of jet fuel per year.
Jet fuel has 46 GJ / tonne.
So that's 4600 billion GJ per year.
Current offshore wind farms (worldwide) produce 23.1 GW.
Apparently power to air can currently achieve 50% efficiency with methane, and 80% is believed to be feasable.
If they crack 80% then that's 0.58 Billion GJ of fuel from offshore.
So we only need to increase our offshore footprint by a multiple of 7900.
Maybe this needs to be for a post fusion world!!!
And have everybody onboard get wind cancer?
Are electric airplanes doomed?
Joe Scott:- Well no but actually yes.
@@Kirealta yes, a fairly dangerous gas is clearly superior to already existing clean burning liquid fuel like propane which has been powering vehicles for about 100 years and it's so clean burning that it's completely safe to run propane fueled engines in enclosed spaces.
@@Kirealta except the point that like i said in the comment you seem to clearly not read and understood that propane is clean burning enough to be run in enclosed spaces like warehouses and mines, but i have to question the intelligence of someone who starts insulting other peoples intelligence based off a single youtube comment as if that's an accurate way to measure that.
@@Kirealta so i attempted to troll you simply for trying to say propane might be better, then i take it that it's ok to assume your a complete dumbass unable to separate trolling from actual facts.
You have biofuels that are a drop-in replacement (cost: Lots of land, maybe rainforest), you have liquid hydrogen combustion and LNG combustion planes, and you have the potential for more efficient designs, like 10,000 passenger ekranoplanes, that allow you to carry more weight per thrust across oceans at slightly lower speed (Ekranoplanes don't work well unless they're huge relative to wave height). You can also bring back airships, which are quite well-suited to solar power.
Any solution likely requires plane tickets that are several times as expensive as they are today, with the commensurate drop in demand.
Say it with me, guys.
HYDROGEN!
(oh, I also love high speed trains)
We talking fuel cells or zeppelins? Not saying I'm against either though.
@@RRW359 We start by burning it, actually.
@@vovacat1797 Like rockets? Those don't burn for very long.
@@RRW359 Yeah, and so they don't burn for long when they use kerosene. Hydrogen is actually even more energy dense. It just takes up a lot of space and requires cryogenics, but it is manageable. If you burn stuff with oxidizer, it is very powerful and short. But if you do it with atmospheric air with tiny fuel volumes in huge air volumes, it cam be stretched for much longer.
yep. One of the very few applications for it in transportation.
The downside is that it burns crazy hot and can't be used in every turbine but right now companies seem to be working on mixing it 50/50 or so with kerosene to make it work; that's at least progress.
This is a perfect use case for Hydrogen fuel cells. They don't work for cars, but they could work for flying.
Edit: Make that liquid Hydrogen, not fuel cells.
even utilizing hydrogen combustion is better too lol
@Rick Lokers Liquid Hydrogen is the Carbon Free alternative to Jet Fuel
@@daloshea6723 Yes, Liquid Hydrogen has Twice the energy per pound of jet fuel. It's better than jet fuel.
@@daloshea6723 burning hydrogen using ambient air creates NOx emissions from the reaction with the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Its a similar issue to cars running diesel.
You'd need a shit ton of adblue
Hydrogen Powered Plane are in our future for long haul transportation by air.
Flygskam - Scam. Didn’t her crew have to be swapped out via air travel?
Shhhh! they like to pretend they are not what they really are.
That wasn't actually the point. The trip across the ocean in the boat wasn't proposing transoceanic boat travel as a replacement for aircraft, it was demonstrating how impractical it is to participate in modern society without burning a lot of carbon.
@@AlRoderick Yeah sure.....that maybe what happened but that IMO was not the original intent.
The density of air is a Be-Atch. As a foiling boat designer, with hopes of either playing the 900x more dense water off that of the air, OR utilizing the wing in ground effect (tricx!) there could be other ways to get across an ocean with such operational efficiencies. But then again, we could also evacuate tubes or use the vacuum above our atmosphere to get from A to B on the planet too. E-tech is not the only way to improve "air" travel.
I remember reading when Greta then had the entire crew of that boat fly back home so it actually tripled the amount of total air travel for a publicity stunt.
Please correct me (with source) if I'm wrong because that was awhile ago and I wasn't there.
My understanding was they carbon offset the flight of the crew back as they had to do so in order to get the boat back: apnews.com/article/be12be49011743daaa3646edb0de0b61
@@raphaelkinney I have solar panels on my roof. Want to buy some carbon offsets?
A small input from a scandinavian about flygskam and all that to add some context people in the US might not have: the european train networks are _very_ extensive and developed compared to the american one. If I need to get to any other city in Europe, I can probably find a train route or connection of routes to get me there in about a day while still paying less than a flight ticket would cost. Flying is faster as long as you're going from and to a major city, but once you factor in check-ins, check-outs, controls, boarding, etc, it's not _much_ faster, which is why a lot of people are starting to see it as unnecessary.
A great example of why we absolutely need a public transport train network in the US. Not only would it reduce emissions from unnecessary plane flights but also from cars, especially in cities like LA where the abysmal public transportation leads to thousands of cars sitting in traffic for hours everyday.
@@mckendreespringer5664 Very much so. I hope you get the ball rolling over in the USA; if your rails were updated with modern tech domestic transportation and freight could become both faster and cheaper, while vastly cutting down emissions.
i see an obvious solution here:
carry on with jet engines...
... running on synthetic fuel.
that's carbon neutral.
Mr. Z. ,
That sounds like solar-poduced ammonia to me ; heck , that's what coastal-deserts are really for ! .😎
*Give my Quora Post a read at :
"Is it possible to collect the Sun's energy in the Sahara Desert , and transport it to the northern countries ?"
VTOL changes everything. All the limitations you mentioned are seriously reduced. Up to 75% of the wing area is removed along with its weight, the entire undercarriage along with its weight. With six electric engines that rotate, all the control surfaces are redundant along with their weight. The combined reduction in weight radically changes every power and energy density equation.
Have we talked about Hydrogen-Planes yet?
You mean like the hindenburg?
@@alphatrion100 yeah... no
@@geegee952
flying on board of a hydrogen bomb just doesnt seem that smart.
@@alphatrion100
corrosion-doctors.org/Hydrogen/Hindenburg.htm
@@alphatrion100 not sure jet fuel is any safer then liquid hydrogen
Joe why not make a video about trains and there evolution from steam to maglev and the advantage over air travel.
The slow lifestyle might be coming back into fashion. 😎
What? you mean the Panoptigon lifestyle, like The Hunger Games, sure you can stay put but the 1% will rove around seeing the sights, whatever, just go crawl into a tiny house and sprout some seedlings and lower your expectations.
@@Veldtian1 I would love to become a gardener living in a tiny home
Human nature says: No.
@@DJ_Force But global pandemic says: yes
@@riggs20 But when Global Pandemic is gone, human nature will revert to its natural state. People love to travel, and if Zoom was as good as face to face, Facebook would have replaced bars and clubs.
One alternative for efficient air-travel over oceans is ekranoplan (aka Ground Effect Vehicles or GEVs for short). They use the ground effect to their advantage and are estimated to use about half the fuel of corresponding propeller aircraft. One compromise is that their max speed is about 65% of the current commercial jet planes, but that's actually not that bad.
Another constraint is that they need mostly flat surface under them so ekranoplan flights over land are big challenge, but oceans are good that way.
Just for reference:
"The Soviet-built Lun-class ekranoplan had a range of 2,000km and a potential cruising speed at 550 km/h" and that was a plane from the 80s
I'd love a video on possible alternative fuel sources and how applicable they would be
That’s a great idea. I second to that. One possible alternative is a mixture of cooking oil and kerosene. I do hope the owner of this channel sees my comment containing multiple links. Another biofuel suggested by the owner of the channel in a pinned comment, if I remember correctly is algae.
He said MB-E1 and my brain instantly thought of transformers for some reason 🤔
Let's go back to blimps. I'm sure we've figured out how to make them safe by now.
Yes, but are you willing to go to Europe at 60 miles an hour (100kph). Not many people would be willing to take 10 times the airplane's trip time or pay 10 times the current 1st class airfare to go by airship.
A ship can do the trip in 5 days at a reasonable cost per passenger, but steam ship lines went broke 60 years ago because they couldn't compete with jet airplanes.
@@aceroadholder2185 LOL they can improve on all those metrics also the high cost of air travel run under a government program is nothing unusual let actual businesses run it and you will be amazed.
@@Barskor1 If you can design a lighter-than-air craft that can cruise at 500 mph and carry hundreds of passengers, you may win the Nobel prize in something.
@@joesterling4299 You don't want it to be lighter than air just have a large portion of the weight compensated for and be something like a flying wing using that large surface area for lift as well as buoyancy.
I agree with your comment above. One possible way out of this is to synthetize fuels from renewable energy and then burn them or use fuel cells. This would be just a way of going through an energy buffer, from low density to high density. Energy is almost never the problem: it is usually a problem of power, density, load matching,...
With most flights being rather short, Hyperloop and other high-speed rail options seem to be more promising.
For short travels in highly populated areas, no doubt. But here in Norway, building a thousand mile hyperloop in order to move a few thousand people every day, would be very overkill. Fun, but overkill. Efficiency probably means going slower and more comfortably. I don't understand why we're not talking about airships. Extremely safe, extremely efficient and extremely comfortable. But not fast and that's ok because we have the internet now.
You might want to look up some videos by Thunderf00t on Hyperloop... It's kind of impossible to build. High speed rail can't help either. Trains are very good on mid range, but that is still shorter than short range flights (over ground). There will be a huge sobering up after reality set's in. Fuel is simply too energy dense to be ever replaced, regardless how efficient your engines get.
Unfortunately because America is so developed now just buying the land to build the railroad is going to be $25 million a mile... and that's just in the countryside. In a city it could easily be $250 million a mile. That's one reason the California LA to San Frisco high speed rail at present will start in the middle of nowhere and go the edge of nowhere... a money making endeavor for sure.
Aceroadholder The city of LA owns all the streets and highways, just get rid of streets, or place the rail pylons on top of the streets, then no land needs to be bought.
@@infernowo7093 Interesting idea. Not sure it would be economically feasable, thoguh.
Love your videos, Joe. One possible replacement for more climate-friendly and fuel efficient air transport is the old technology of the airship/blimp. They'll never travel nearly as fast as a jet plane, but they can carry large amounts of heavy cargo by air without the need for roads or airport runways for landing, and perhaps modern technology can get them to fly faster than freight trucking. I'd be curious to see an analysis of how much better an airship/blimp could be than a jet plane in terms of fuel efficiency. Lockheed Martin has developed a Hybrid Airship you can read about here: www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/hybrid-airship.html
Biofuels in the short term, synthetic fuels from hydrogen and captured co2 long term
Thanks Joe; informative as always. Worth mentioning is that jet fuel is NOT as energy dense as mentioned, but is thought to be so because it uses atmospheric oxygen to get the heat units. Doesn't matter by some analyses, but it does in that it's all about the atmosphere and how we're trashing it. As you mentioned as well.
Shaving my head was one of the best things I've ever done! Don't knock it!
In what ways?
@@hackerulroman Just a whole set of worries completely removed from my day to day life. It's liberating. I was worried that I would look weird...now I look at pictures of when I had hair and THEY look weird.
@@plutoniumshore Been doing it myself for 20 years. It really is liberating. Namaste ✌
When you're hot and sweaty, so you remove your hat to expose your bald head... Magical.
@@plutoniumshore I was thinking about the discomfort of the small spikes that grow shortly after it's shaved and I'm 15 so I don't think I could look my best shaved. Regardless, it's still tempting
Alternatively, we could move to nationwide electric high speed rail powered by nuclear & renewables for domestic travel
Probably still end up sitting near some inevitably crying baby.
Yeah because building an ifrastructure that immense won't have any environmental impacts.
The single biggest infrastructure change that we could make would be to alter our powerplants to burn hydrogen . This being produced from large-scale desert/ sea production complexes around the globe . The economies of scale involved would then bring the price of hydrogen down to a reasonable level for the air- transport industry . This would still be more difficult and expensive than using jet-fuel , but not undoable .
Long-term , beamed-power may make electric airplanes practical as well .
*To examine this subject in more detail , read my post # 2 at :
quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-collect-the-Sun-s-energy-in-the-Sahara-desert-and-transport-it-to-the-northern-countries/
@@SofaKingShit still quiter than a crying baby and a jet engine
Joe, where does all this extra electricity come from?
From the wall socket, what did you think ? LoL
8:10 - This is true for larger aircraft, but most smaller airplanes are unable to dump fuel. This is true even for the 757, which can easily carry 220 passengers more than 4,200 miles! This is because the certified Maximum Takeoff Weight (MTOW) and Maximum Landing Weight (MLW) of these aircraft are close enough together where they would only need to circle for an hour or two in order to be light enough to land safely.
The whole video I was waiting for the hydrogen elephant in the room. And it didn't come. You could have shortened this video by spending one minute on "a battery's storage capacity is not high enough and the weight of a plane would be too high, but hydrogen would work..."
Why is anyone even thinking about batteries when hydrogen is the obvious (and as I see ONLY) solution for CO2 neutral(long haul) flights. Plus it could be produced locally at airports just using electricity. Something most airports have access to...
Because our current methods for refining hydrogen fuels at the industrial scales needed for this application produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to defeat the entire purpose of using the hydrogen fuel. It could work some day but at the moment, we're at the limits of our engeneering capabilities. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but in raw usable form, its very rare on Earth.
@@petrapatia6395 but this seems like a task that we can fix and where we don't run into problems with the (physical) laws.
@@chh4516 People have been trying to fix it, and there are cleaner means of refining Hydrogen, but the problem then is with scaling that (still extremely energy intense) method to the industrial size capable of supplying cost comparative fuel for the very high demand it would be taking on. Its complicated and there are many other videos on the subject if you're curious. Deff worth looking into. essentially you're dealing with a rocket equation type of situation.
@@petrapatia6395 but don't we refine hydrogen with electricity so the environmental problems are the same as with electric flying. Hydrogen could possibly be a green option but just like with electric flying we need to produce more green electricity
@@petrapatia6395 It sounds to me that the issue of scalability is one that can actually be addressed though*albeit by assuming mass adoption of renewables and their continuous improvements, whereas batteries seem like an impermeable wall. Aside from some miracle discovery in energy density for batteries my guess is that we'll have a good shot at massively upscaling hydrogen production as wind and solar become far more commonplace in the next decade.
I enjoyed the video but seriously, 'change your behavior' is the cop out answer to the question and using Gretta's sail across the Atlantic as a legitimate long-haul alternative is a bit silly (it was a PR stunt more than anything else). It's like saying the answer to the Cobalt video you made just being 'change your behavior and use less technology thus we use less cobalt'. Both are so integral to the modern world that really it's not a feasible alternative at all (at this stage).
Why not discus innovations in jet technology and efficiency, lighter plane designs requiring less fuel, engines that produce more thrust, better plane aerodynamics ect. I enjoy your renewables spin (hence watching your vids), but sometimes you've gotta give it to fossil fuels are simply indispensable within some industries for the foreseeable future and maybe explain that if we can't simply innovate our way to a new solution we should focus on better improving what we currently have.
But what if we can't do it in time?
And what if "changing our behavior" is a way to buy more time?
@To Release is To Resolve It's useless for them to do it if people like you don't also do it.
Grammar, punctuation, run-on and broken sentences... Wow! Where did you go to school?
@To Release is To Resolve - If everyone would go low tech enough to stop global warming... problem solved, but you have to participate. We are not going to do it all without you. Oh, and BTW, low tech farming may not grow enough food for 8 to 10 billion people.
Hydrogen powered aircraft are a zero emissions possibility like the Skylon. Compressed hydrogen has far better energy density by weight and density than batteries.
Is the process to compress hydrogen to sufficient output levels zero emission?
@@jeremymenning56 Electrolysis and compression process may be done without emissions using renewables energy sources. However, this method isn't the most efficient one considering the energy needed.
This is actually doable, but the production of that hydrogen fuel needs to come from far cleaner industrial scale refinement processes than what is currently scaled. Otherwise you're emitting CO2 to avoid emitting CO2... defeating the purpose.
Sounds good. Because we know that huge amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere isn't going to impact the thermal balance of the planet at all.
Liquid Hydrogen tanks weigh less, which is important with aircraft. Hydrogen has double the energy density of any other carbon based fuel, because Hydrogen weights half of what everything else does. Hydrogen has no Neutron!
Our best strategies for dealing with aviation right now, as far as I know:
Don't;s of individuals
* Don't fly/travel at all unless it is a truly crucial flight/trip
* Don't fly unless that is the most environmentally friendly option
* When you fly, don't do so for a single reason, only to go back as soon as your main reason for the flight/trip is over
Do;s of individuals
* Do travel for important occasions and job opportunities, and for vacation if you want to but do so more often by not having to travel or travel not as far
* Do choose the most environmentally friendly option you can find that is within your travel budget
* When you fly/travel, do make the flight/trip well worth it, visit people you know and love that are in the area or just fly/travel for those occasions, visit neighbouring countries if you are on vacation et.c.
Do;s of society and the transportation network/industries
* Do electrify the most common short flights
* Do invest in reforestation, forest protection and CCS for carbon sequestration
* Do convert the aviation industry to sustainable aviation fuel made from biofuel and/or vegetable oils, alternatively hydrogen fuel cells
* Do invest in electric train networks, hopefully, the really speedy ones, alongside renewable energy
Why not use alternative fuels like: bio diesel, ethanol or hydrogen?!
And were do you plan to get that from? Should we build chicken farms to make diesel from chicken fat or maybe directly use food producing areas to make diesel? What is the plan? And just forget about ethanol. You need to put in more enegery in the process than you get out from it. Btw, jet engines runs on kerosene.
Look at an energy density scale. Gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel occupy the highest energy density to volume ratio of any standard fuel sources. They are at the top of the pile. Here's the rough list of energy densities from least dense to most dense (with some variation, considering that some of these are fuels and some of them are solids and their method of energy usage is different):
1. Batteries
2. Compressed Hydrogen Gas
3. Cooled Liquid Hydrogen
4. Compressed Natural Gas
5. Methanol
6. Ethanol
7. Liquified Natural Gas
8. Compressed Propane
9. Gasoline
10. Biodiesel
11. Aviation Gasoline
12. Jet Fuel
13. Diesel
Biodiesel might be an option if you can produce it efficiently and at low cost, can store it effectively, and it won't have serious long-term effects on engines. All of which are difficult problems for Biodiesel.
Ethanol is 33% less efficient than Jet Fuel, so that's probably a non-starter in the same way that batteries are a non-starter for large aircraft.
Hydrogen fuels are interesting. While they have an energy density volume of about 25% of gasoline (1/4 of the energy per liter of fuel, at best), they have a weight of around 40% of gasoline (2.5 times lighter). While weight is an important factor, volume is also very important when dealing with aerodynamic systems like aircraft. To get roughly the same energy capacity for a hydrogen plane as one powered by just gasoline (not the more efficient jet fuel), while retaining the same weight in fuel, about 60% more room would be needed for fuel that could no longer be used for passengers or cargo. You also have to spend energy to cool and compress hydrogen, whereas jet fuel requires no meaningful energy to store.
@@jomen112 Usually they make it from algae grown in ponds or plastic tubes, but you can also use vegetable oils.
@@dwighthouse So . . . We trade off a little bit of energy density for being carbon neutral, but ideally we can still use existing engines!
@@jomen112 And the ethanol energy argument is an old disproven one! You definitely get more out; it's like saying you can't use gasoline because of the transport costs!
This is where I come to get away from the world. Thank you Joe.
Joe: "Global warming is extremely dangerous and we need to act right now because all our lives depend on it."
Me: "What do you think about nuclear energy?"
Joe: "eh"
Thank you! Nuclear is crucial in fighting climate change
Thing is, renewables are cheaper, and base load power issue is now being addressed by energy storage. There is still work to be done in bolstering the grid, but that doesn't seem too hard, relatively. Nuclear sounds great, but it's expensive, and there will always be the nagging issue is safe long term storage.... for hundreds, thousands of years. I'd rather deal with the downsides of renewables than nuclear
@@deansmits006 I did not know that. Could you provide me with the cost difference per kilowatt hr of Nuclear vs. Renewables?
@@deansmits006 Also, when you answer Over There, try to include the TOTAL cost. Not the marginal cost of wind/solar, but the average cost. In addition, can you quote the cost which includes the storage and the grid expansion needed to make intermittent wind and solar dispatchable?
Y'know, all those costs that low-carbon nuclear does not require.
@@factnotfiction5915 add in the environmental impact of everything it takes to create storage.
I think that if we changed our habits of traveling and requirements it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Instead of limited vacation time being used to travel we just wouldn't have to worry about how long it takes vs now we're wasting what little time we have so fast as possible is ideal (this is just to fix the prop plane speed issue)
10:08 Yes, I certainly remember how her parents used their own child as a political puppet, then hypocritically flew back home on a private jet.
And the initial trip wasn't even close to carbon-neutral to begin with.
They could drop batteries with little parachutes along their flight to lower weight. Hahaha
This has been done with rockets (electric pumps)
The battery pack could be slung under the planes CoG and could have its own control surfaces to glide to an airport along the way.
But why not just directly burning hydrogen? It can be produced electrically with solar power, and produces water when burned.
Every battery pack should have it's own engines and when the pack has run out of juice it'll disengage and fly away unto a landing zone.
@@alephkasai9384
Yes, the battery pack could afford to have much smaller, slower, and more efficient engines, too.
Why did you ignore the elephant in the room? Hydrogen. It has three times the energy density of kerosene.
Hydrogen has plenty of its own problems. To start with it requires much stronger containment, and given that fuel storage on planes is generally within the wings there's not a whole lot of options for "thicker" without impacting flight performance. Its also significantly more dangerous when containment fails (ie: it goes boom a lot easier than jet fuel).
And then of course there's the biggest problem: Producing it. Separating hydrogen out of water is a very energy-intensive process and that energy has to come from somewhere. In the long term once we're mostly or fully converted to non-carbon sources for grid power that might be OK, but in the short term, using hydrogen has a higher carbon output than just burning the fossil fuels and adding that much extra load on the grid isn't going to help us transition faster.
Hydrogen fuel may well be part of our final energy solution, but for now there are too many hurdles to using it on any sort of large scale -- at least not cleanly (and that's the whole point, after all).
He ignored it because this video was about electric planes. Perhaps he’ll make a video on other forms of fuel for air travel.
One idea I didn't hear you mention was in air refueling. Something like a hot air balloon, holding a drone carrying batteries, perhaps being charged via solar when not in use, swaps batteries with the main flight unit mid air.
So if aircraft are next to impossible we could start using ships again for international travel. I see no reason electric ships couldn't work.
One reason: speed
i think speed is a worthy sacrifice for the future of our planet, especially since we have the internet now.
@@MalcolmCooks nahm it's not.
it definately is
@@MalcolmCooks Definitely isn't
"We will all work from home" excluding the majority of professions which can't
there's a lot fewer planes than all land-bound vehicles combined. Juts let them use fossil fuels and only electrify where it's practical.
But how will that affect people's ability to virtue signal?
Nice shirt!
So, the solution is to basically have the aviation equivalent of having an EV like a 2012 VW eGolf for your local trips/commute and a 2008 diesel VW Passat (pre-"Dieselgate") for longer trips. Maybe high-speed rail, but that requires significant infrastructure to be built (here in Texas, and the USA in general. Although one is in the planning stages here). So, electric airplanes for shorter commuter flights and traditional kerosene (jet fuel) high-bypass turbofan "jets" for trans-continental and trans-oceanic flights.
Avoiding the mention of Musk's iPads-on-wheels deliberately. IMHO those are made for the masses (and deep pockets), not driving enthusiasts (with limited budgets). But, that's a whole other soap box for another day.