Story ID: 424
Aviation Chases Carbon Cutting Quantum Leap
By: Charles Alcock
Caption: With climate change metrics intensifying, air transport has a mountain to climb to achieve the legally-binding net-zero carbon requirement in 2050. 
Word Count: 2546
The countdown clock keeping track of how long aviation has got to eliminate damaging emissions keeps ticking, and more loudly than ever. The air transport industry has another 27 years to deliver on the net-zero carbon commitment in 2050, and yet at the 2023 Paris Air Show, many will wonder whether it really can break its dependence on fossil fuels.
The pressure is becoming unrelenting, with eco-protestors anticipated at the Le Bourget event this week and governments showing a willingness to force the issue with measures such as France’s recent ban on domestic flights between cities for which the train journey takes less than two and a half hours.
This November’s COP 28 UN Climate Change Conference in the UAE is expected to acknowledge that the world is falling well short of the key objective of the COP 25 conference held in Paris at Le Bourget Airport in 2015 to limit “the increase in global average temperature well below 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels” and “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius.” The latter pledge looks set to be in tatters before the end of this decade, as the World Meteorological Organization now says the 1.5 C do-not-exceed limit will be breached, spurring demands for tougher action across all industries.
According to a report published on Friday by consultants McKinsey, as of April just 25 airlines, mainly based in the Americas and Europe, have set themselves independently verifiable goals backed by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), established by the UN Global Compact, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the World Resources Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. McKinsey’s study also noted that only 20 percent of aerospace and defense companies, representing around 20 percent of the “global value pool,” have pledged to meet SBTi’s goals.
The SBTi program has laid out a path for aviation to make a tangible contribution to staying within the 1.5 Celsius climate change limit by achieving a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) per revenue tonne-kilometer by 2030 (compared with 2019 levels). The bar then rises to a 50 percent reduction by 2035.
The McKinsey report urges airlines to develop so-called marginal abatement cost curves to help them “compare and sequence different carbonization measures while also allowing for adjustments and updates.” Aside from the increased use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which continues to be stymied by insufficient supplies, and long-overdue modernization of air traffic management to eliminate wasteful routings, fleet replacement represents a key pathway.
Will Airframers Deliver Green Aviation?
In the dark depths of the Covid pandemic in September 2020, Airbus served up a ray of hope by announcing its ZeroE plan to bring hydrogen-powered airliners to market by the second half of the 2030s. More recently, the European group confirmed plans to develop a successor to its ubiquitous A320 family of single-aisle airliners that CEO Guillaume Faury has said will have to achieve a 20 to 25 percent cut in fuel burn. It is actively exploring new propulsion options for the program, which will run in tandem with ZeroE, and they notably include CFM International’s Rise open fan/rotor engine.
Rival Boeing has yet to deviate beyond a path offering just incremental improvements to its current family of aircraft while sticking to the mantra that SAF will eventually become more readily available and usable in increasingly reduced-carbon blends. Still, the U.S. group is accelerating its work with NASA on a transonic truss-braced wing concept, now designated as the X-66A, featuring extra-long, thin wings attached to the fuselage with diagonal struts as part of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project that has drawn $425 million in funding under the U.S. Aviation Climate Action Plan, as well as a $725 million investment by Boeing and industry partners.
Late last year, Brazil’s Embraer rejigged the priorities for its Energia future aircraft program to focus primarily on various hybrid-electric and hydrogen fuel cell-based concepts. The first fruits of the effort will likely be new regional airliners seating between 19 and 30 passengers that would start entering service in 2030.
But airlines may soon have a somewhat left-field alternative to consider in the sustainability stakes. A start-up called JetZero is pressing the case for a blended wing body (BWB) airliner that it insists offers air carriers an assured fast track to cutting fuel burn and carbon emissions in half.
The California-based company is building a supplier and funding base for a plan that it says could bring a 250-passenger aircraft with a range of over 5,000 nm to market by the early 2030s. It says the aircraft needs no more than existing engines and avionics and will be viable with or without SAF.
While other airframers’ plans to "go green" largely hinge on the next big advance in propulsion technology, for JetZero it’s all about the BWB’s entirely different aerodynamics, which the company says fundamentally circumvents the all-drag-no-lift characteristics of conventional tube-and-wing airframes. It claims all aspects of the BWB architecture deliver lift and result in an airframe weighing about half of equivalent aircraft (see JetZero sidebar).
SIDEBAR
JetZero Says Blended Wing Lift Will Drive Down Carbon Counts
Though only incorporated in 2022, JetZero traces its origins back to McDonnell Douglas’s work on BWB concepts back in the 1990s, which was led by JetZero founder and chief technology officer Mark Page. His company Dzyne Technologies continued to advance BWB technology through projects backed by NASA to the tune of more than $1 billion, and JetZero owns the intellectual property that he says will deliver an oven-ready solution to air transport’s urgent need for a quantum leap in emissions reduction.
“There are two bits of magic here,” Page told AIN. “One is the lift-to-drag ratio with much less surface area than the 1990s [BWB] aircraft, and the structure is also very light thanks to NASA research that proved it is possible to make a fail-safe structure.”
Page said Boeing, Airbus, and Embraer all declined offers to collaborate in a BWB program, leading JetZero to forge an alliance with Northrop Grumman’s Scaled Composites unit, which will build and test a full-scale prototype that is expected to fly in 2027. “Each of them thought the concept was too close to them and their positions in the middle marketplace, and so we realized we would have to do this with partners who already have scale in terms of tooling and production capability,” he said.
At the Paris Air Show JetZero is conducting a packed schedule of meetings with prospective Tier 1 suppliers that may sign up as risk-sharing partners in the program. It is also in talks with airlines to seek early expressions of interest.
A key player in the latter discussions is Nina Jonsson, the former head of fleet strategy with Air France/KLM, who has previously held similar roles at airlines including United and Icelandair. She believes her peers are in for a very pleasant surprise.
“For the last three decades, 80 percent of the job has involved figuring out ways to make airlines more profitable and burn less fuel, and chasing half a percent of saving drives whether you are profitable or not, even though you have no control over the price of fuel,” she told AIN. “The most I ever saved was four percent when they put winglets on a [Boeing] 757, and so when they [JetZero] said they can achieve 50 percent I thought they were out of their minds. We’re so conditioned to think about engine technology delivering fuel savings that we’ve never really thought about the airframe, and so could only look at incremental improvements.”
Quantum Leap In Fuel Burn Reduction
But now the imperative to reduce fossil fuel consumption is about more than airline balance sheets; it could potentially amount to a more existential challenge if governments decide to press for much bigger and faster reductions in carbon emissions. “I don’t want to waste the next 12 years doing nothing,” said Page. “And there will be airline commitments once they get beyond the first holy cow moment.”
Recognizing that the task of integrating even off-the-shelf systems will require a multi-billion-dollar budget, JetZero is in the running for a $245 million U.S. Department of Defense award to develop a new tanker aircraft. The company claims that in tanker configuration, the new BWB aircraft would be able to carry as much fuel as the current KC-46 workhorse over twice the distance or double the fuel load at its current operating radius.
However, Page insisted that advancing work on the BWB prototype does not entirely hinge on winning this contract, predicting that once the aircraft takes to the air, “the value proposition will be so compelling that we do not anticipate problems raising these funds.” In fact, the company is also set to close a Series A funding round and says it intends to raise “several hundred million more” to support the development and testing of the prototype. It already has attracted an undisclosed investment from Tony Fadell’s Build Collective venture capital group.
According to Page, much of the conceptual design work is complete and JetZero’s small engineering team has been flight testing a series of scale models, as well as conducting simulator and test bench exercises. This summer, the company will start flying a 12.5 percent scale model.
Once the engines and other key equipment have been selected, including fly-by-wire flight controls, the systems integration task will begin to plug everything into the BWB, which could hardly be more different from the aircraft on which the off-the-shelf kit is currently in service.
JetZero and Scaled Composites will make a technology demonstrator first so that the chosen systems can be applied to that a full two years ahead of a conforming design being available. Page said this will save development time, while still leaving scope for the conforming aircraft to be optimized. According to JetZero, the all-composite airframe will be assembled using new construction techniques for strong, non-circular pressure vessels that have been tested by NASA.
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