Since about 1973, the year of the first oil embargo, muddle-headed politicians from both parties have used the absurd idea of "energy independence" as a campaign talking point that rube voters will swill like free beer. But in the ugly trench warfare of daily politics, their actual votes sometimes undermine this supposed apple-pie-and-motherhood, all-purpose good thing.

That's what a Republican-led group in the House Armed Services Committee did last week when it voted to kill the Department of Defense's plan to run its airplanes on a blend of half biofuel and half conventional Jet A by the year 2017. Slipped into the defense department's appropriation is language that would prohibit the services from spending more for fuel than they do for traditional fossil fuels. If it sounds like an amendment written by an oil company lobbyist, it probably is.

If this vote stands, the effects are far reaching, especially for the Navy, whose ambitious "Green Fleet" plans foresee the service running entirely on a 50-50 blend of fossil and biofuels by 2017. (For more on this, listen to this podcast.) As early as next month, the Navy hoped to put a battle group to sea fueled entirely on a bio-fuel blend. Both the Navy and Air Force have extensively tested aviation bio-fuels refined from camelina and are satisfied that they perform as well as fossil fuels.

So what's the problem? The cost, obviously, which is variously estimated at more than twice to as much to four times as much as fossil fuels. Blending the two helps reduce that cost, but the blend is still more expensive. The military's concern here is mostly about supply security and the cost of delivering the fuel—both in dollars and lives lost in protecting fuel convoys against attacks. The Pentagon recently estimated that in Afghanistan, it costs $400 a gallon to get fuel in theater. Even if that's an exaggeration by ten fold, it's obviously expensive to fuel military operations and always has been. This cost may be meant to suggest a geopolitical price, too. If we're less dependent on imported oil, maybe we're less inclined to enter wars where it's extracted.

The justification for spending more on biofuels is that in doing so, the services would be priming the pump to drive up the volume, lower costs and improve efficiency in a way that would make biofuels more competitive not just for the services, but for civilian buyers of Jet A, too. In other words, it's really a government subsidy to support an emerging industry. Let's see, where have I heard this argument before? Oh, yeah…that's what the corn state pols—many of them fiscally conservative Republicans—said when they enacted tax credits for the ethanol industry. Thirty years into that, we have $6 billion in government handouts going mainly to three large producers of ethanol, a fuel that isn't green, no one likes and has about as much chance of assuring energy independence as converting the railroads back to wood-fired steam.

The problem here isn't the principle. The idea that government R&D should fund industries and/or ideas that eventually become economic, profitable entities is sound and the country has flourished doing this very thing. Think about nuclear energy, the microchip, the internet, penicillin—it was a USDA lab that figured out how to increase yield. The list is long. The problem is knowing when to stop shoveling funds into the public trough so the embryonic industry can live or die of its own economic vitality.

Left to their own devices, elected officials would struggle with such decisions but, beholden as they are to special-interest money, sensible long-term public policy is all but extinct. The proof is in the ethanol program, which any sane person could only conclude has been an enormous boondoggle. But does that mean that the DOD's green fuel initiative will go the same way?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Although the green lobby persistently overstates the economics and importance of biofuels, that doesn't mean they have no role. That the economics haven't worked yet is not an argument that they never will. We are still firmly in the age of oil and the fact that technology is yielding yet more hydrocarbons, not less, complicates the emergence of biofuels.

But just because that's true now, doesn't mean it will be in 20 years, which means that the House's vote to kill DOD's plans looks fiscally sound, but just stupidly short sighted. Energy conversion transformations happen in decade scales, not years or months. And sometimes, research leads to expensive blind alleys. The Navy's Green Fleet plans may be one of those, but it's worth taking it a little further to find out, in my view.

If I were king, I'd kill ethanol's $6 billion free ride and give half the money to DOD for bio-fuel research with a statutory limit of say, seven years. But that may make far too much sense, I guess.

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Just as I thought I'd seen everything, along comes Spirit Airlines suing the government for the right to engage in bait-and-switch advertising. You probably saw the story this week.

Spirit has taken the idea of unbundling—that is, unbundling everything from the seat except the upholstery (and maybe even that)-- and charging extra for it to absolutely artistic levels.

Now Spirit is steamed that the government is requiring that its advertised fares include not just the fare itself, but also the taxes and relevant fees.

And what fees! By this fall, Spirit will charge $30 for a carry-on bag, $28 for a checked bag, between $1 and $50 for a reserved seat, up to $15 for drinks and snacks, $12 to $199 for an extra-wide seat and, my favorite, an unintended consequences of DOT regulations fee of $2, which everyone pays each way.

These fees are almost comically absurd, but they're also American capitalism at its best. The cheapest possible prices and plenty of choices so that the customer can tailor his or her airline experience from absolutely horrid to sort of tolerable. Spirit is suing on the grounds that its first amendment rights are being trampled. Good luck with that one. It will be an interesting head butt between the commercial code and the Constitution.

I flew Spirit once, but wouldn't again. The service was adequate, but they have so many fees now that I'd be afraid of more being added while I drove to the airport.

Higher Fares
And speaking of fares, you may have noticed they're up--as much as 25 percent. There are two reasons for this. One is higher fuel prices and the other is reduced capacity--the airlines have cut back on flight frequency and, in some cases, switched to smaller airplanes on some routes. United, for instance, has chopped up to 16 percent of its flights; Southwest about 6 percent.

Supply and demand does the rest, so fares rise. While I don't like paying the higher fares, I'd rather pay and have airlines run as profitable businesses than be niggled to death by ancillary fees. So I'm willing to suck it up and just pay.

The downside is airplanes filled to the gills with passengers as load factors sustain above 80 percent. In the name of efficiency, that's the way it goes. Another downside, unfortunately, is less flexibility in scheduling and a much higher probability of the airline re-routing or re-scheduling you whether you like it or not. Supply and demand again. I suspect the airlines will have to add back a little capacity once the curve reaches bottom. We'll see.

Delta Makes Its Own Gas
I'd like have lunch with the MBA who came up with this idea: Delta bought an oil refinery near Philadelphia in order to makes its own jet fuel. ConocoPhillips unloaded the thing for a fire sale price.

Now I'm no expert on oil refining but I have the phone numbers of people who are. If you fancied yourself wanting to find a fortune in the oil business, the last aspect you'd want to get into is refining. All the money is on the upstream side and refiners, which are typically structured as independent business units, often lose money. It's just a tough, thankless business that requires gobs of capital for little, if any, return. And it's not like Delta can convert all of the barrels of oil it will have to buy into Jet A. Refining doesn't work that way. You have to make a range of products or get someone else to.

It makes me wonder if Delta's board was awake when this proposal floated by. Maybe the losses will sweeten their tax position. Only in the airline business could you seek more losses to make money. I give it five years before they'll be trying to get out of the refinery business in a hurry. Carry-on bag fees, anyone?

Virgin's New Cell Service
Meanwhile, Virgin Atlantic is introducing a new service that lifts the ban on in-cabin use of cellphones. Beginning this year on its London-New York routes, Virgin will offer a service which appears to provide a local cell network inside the cabin through a satellite link. It will be available to six users at a time and, evidently, only in business class. (Imagine the fights over divvying up that limited service to the road warriors in the biz section.)

This could end up being an interesting sociological experiment over the wilds of the North Atlantic. Even though passengers will be asked to keep usage to a minimum, we all know that 3.6 percent of the population are loud, obnoxious cellphone users or obsessive texters. Personally, on a long international flight, I'm perfectly happy having the cellphone silent and pray that whoever is in the seat next to me feels the same.

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Last month, on the drive from our hotel in Austria to the Aero exposition halls in Friedrichshafen, the route carried us over a stretch of one of those famous autobahns with no speed limit. Actually, it may have had a posted limit, but no one was paying any attention to it. I wound up our little Ford Ka rental to a blistering 162 Kph—about 100 MPH, a speed at which it's not terribly confidence inspiring.

As is common in Europe, I looked in the rearview mirror to see a pair of headlights closing at the speed of heat. It was a Mercedes turbodiesel that swished by doing probably 230. It was out of sight in 20 seconds. You see a lot of this in Germany because Germans like their high-performance cars and they like economy, too. It wouldn't surprise me if the Merc was making 30 MPG even at that speed.

In Europe, diesels have about 53 percent of the automotive market, so the fact that this technology migrated to airplanes, first by Thielert and now by Austro, was inevitable. Diamond didn't push diesel sales in the U.S. because it felt U.S. buyers don't get—or at least don't want—diesel engines in cars or airplanes. (Boats and trucks are another matter.) One comment on our Austro factory tour video summed it up: "408 pounds; 168 HP. No thanks."

This is a fairly typical diesel prejudice not entirely without merit, but also likely ignorant of careful analysis. On paper, both the Thielert and Austro diesels have several factors going against them. The big one for Austro is weight, but that's an issue with Thielert, too. Second, they have gearboxes. It's not like reduction gearboxes haven't been successful in airplanes and going way back, too. The Rolls Royce Merlin had a gearbox. So do many radial engines. It's just that for light aircraft, gear trains have had a checkered history and the truly bulletproof light GA engines have tended to be direct drive. Last, diesel engines generate strong torque pulses that are hard on props, requiring either a clutch (Thielert) or a torsional damper (Austro).

Thielert attacked the weight problem by recasting the basic Daimler-Benz four-cylinder diesel it used as a core in aluminum, a decision which brought its own problems. Austro, on the other hand, stuck with Daimler's original cast iron as a tradeoff for durability, leaving it up to the airframer to certify at a higher weight and reduce empty weight. (Diamond did both, cancelling out much of the Austro's higher weight for its diesel twins.)

In general, the diesels have been more expensive to buy, have shorter overhaul periods and have periodic component inspections that are a nuisance. Furthermore, Jet A is only a bit cheaper than avgas and in some places, it's more expensive. So you add all this up, and the diesel is doomed, right? Well, it would be save for one simple fact: Diesels are more economical than gasoline engines by a margin great enough to more than offset those disadvantages. I've interviewed a number of Thielert owners, reviewed their numbers and sure enough, even with all the troubles Thielert has been through, they still come out even or a bit ahead against a gasoline engine. As diesels mature, the trend line moves more in the diesel's favor.

Here's a simple example. A 180-HP parallel valve O-360 costs about $20,000 to overall, with a 2000-hour TBO and burning about 9 GPH, block to block. Using $6.04 avgas, the hourly operating cost is $54.36 for fuel and $10 for the engine reserve.

Compare that to the Austro, which costs about the same to overhaul—actually, at $19,400, a little less. (It's not clear to me if this is loss-leader pricing. I'm plugging in the numbers Austro gave me.) The engine burns about 6.5 GPH of $5.65 Jet A for an hourly of $36.72 for fuel and $16 for the engine reserve for a total of $52.72. That's $11.64 an hour less than the gasoline engine. Not impressed? Me, neither, because over the life of engine, that's about $14,000 in savings, a portion of which will be chewed up by the required inspections and component replacements. (To be fair, the Lycoming will have some of those expenses, too.)

But here's where the diesel turns a big corner. Diesels are traditionally high durability engines and Austro would like to get the TBO to 2700 hours. If they succeed, the engine reserve drops to $7 and the hourly goes to $43.90 against the gasoline engine's $64. Over the 2000-hour run of both engines, that's $40,000 less and that ain't chump change for a flight school, which is where many of these airplanes are used. The Thielert numbers aren't as favorable because at 1500 hours, it has to be replaced at a cost of $42,000, but the directionality is the same. At 2000 hours, the Austro reserve goes to $9.70, but it still comes out ahead of the gas engine.

The numbers above reflect U.S. fuel prices. In Europe, the equation favors diesel more strongly because avgas is so expensive. Jet A is about 18 percent cheaper than avgas in Europe. In the U.S. the Delta is about 6 percent.

Mogas is a field leveler both in Europe, where it's more common, and in the U.S., if it can gain a meaningful market foothold. In the U.S., according to AirNav's surveys, mogas averages $4.62 when dispensed at an airport. That's about $1.40 less than avgas. Plugged into the model above, the 2000-hour life cycle savings for mogas against avgas would amount to $25,600—basically the cost of an engine overhaul and then some. Not bad, albeit not quite as efficient as the diesel.

On the other hand, if the 180-HP power band is framed as mogas against diesel, you could argue the two are about equal in the U.S. Although the diesel still enjoys a slightly lower life-cycle fuel cost, its inspections and component replacements can eat that up. In Europe, mogas ranges from $7 to $9, while Jet A is $7 to $10.50 Where the prices are the same, the diesel enjoys a huge advantage in overall cost. If the spread is $3 in favor of mogas, the mogas engine wins, but by a smaller margin because it burns more.

So where does this leave the aerodiesel market? It's a good question that no one can really answer. Thus far, diesels have gained a foothold—just. Thielert has manufactured about 2600 engines and Austro about 450. Diamond is the only OEM to bet big on diesel, with the Austro investment—both because of economy and fuel availability. Looking eastward into Russia and Asia, Diamond is looking for a world fuel. Jet A is definitely it; mogas might be; avgas definitely isn't. Diamond doesn't think mogas will be a player on airports in Russia and eastward.

Continental is covering the board with a couple of new engines approved for mogas, but also an emerging diesel project. Lycoming is bearish on diesel and has aggressively pursued low-octane approvals for many of its engines, albeit not exactly mogas, but a lower-octane aviation fuel. With its new 912 iS, Rotax remains firmly in the gasoline camp, with engines approved for mogas up to E10. The 912 iS is fuel-efficient enough on gasoline that I doubt anyone will bother with a small horsepower diesel.

The major inflection point will come in the high-horsepower market—the 300-HP engines and higher used in airplanes such as the Cirrus and Cessna's heavier models. It seems unlikely that mogas will be a player here and when I say mogas, I'm excluding low-octane alkylate-based offerings like Total's new 91UL. So the visible choices may be the elusive replacement for 100LL or Jet A/diesel. Since I think the likelihood of an affordable, economical turbine is about zero, that leaves a Jet A burning piston with 300 or more horsepower.

Austro is working on this very thing in conjunction with Eurocopter. The AE440, a 400-HP plus V-8. Austro's timeline on this is about a decade, at which point it sees a market gap opening. Besides the large lump of capital required, the biggest challenge will be weight. The under 200-HP diesel represents a power-to-weight sweet spot; as diesels get more powerful, they also get heavier and at some point, they're just too heavy to work no matter what their power output. (Pipistrel, of course, took the tack of developing a low-drag airframe that requires a small displacement gasoline engine that can operate on mogas. But the airplane is some distance from having market impact.)

Where this is going is anyone's guess. The diesel numbers hold up to short-term scrutiny, but the technology just doesn't have enough field experience to prove itself long term. Austro has inarguably proved that the engines aren't too heavy to perform well. Mogas suffers from some of the same ill-informed prejudices that diesel does, but neither it nor diesel are igniting a wild-eyed buying frenzy. As for avgas, well, who the hell knows? All we get are bland and vague assurances that a replacement will be there. Not exactly the stuff of confidence building.

My guess is that a fragmented mix will emerge, dominated by avgas engines for another five to 10 years, with diesel and mogas powerplants grabbing a slice of the market. If you believe in the economy of scale holding prices down, that may not bode well for either diesel or mogas making a dent in the universe quickly, as Steve Jobs used to say. That's especially true if you're an airport operator trying to maintain three fuel systems in a declining market.

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If you haven't seen these video reports by CBS on the F-22 Raptor story, they are worth the time to watch. When they first aired on CBS on Sunday evening, I'm sure I missed the first third of what these two officers were saying because my thoughts wandered off wondering what these two will do now that they've cratered their careers. When I was in the military a million years ago, the only way around the chain of command was through the Chaplain's office and you had better be damn careful what you said there, too.

Maybe the modern military is different. But Captain Josh Wilson and Major Jeremy Gordon stepped right out there in deciding to go on 60 Minutes, without official blessing. You get the feeling they believe the F-22's problems are so serious that neither the public nor the body politic understands them. (Evidently, the Air Force doesn't either.) So today, the second day story was that the Senate will hold hearings on the F-22 and the Air Force says Wilson and Gordon won't be punished. Right. But I suspect they've both got a blunt note in their personnel files that will keep them off the promotions lists.

As I was watching these reports, it occurred to me how ludicrous it is that neither Lockheed Martin nor the Air Force has identified a cause of the Raptor's disabling pilots, much less a solution. Yet the command structure continues to fly the airplane with some unknown risk to the pilots. Wilson told CBS his encounter with the F-22's toxic oxygen system put him in a hyperbaric chamber and he's not the only one. How can the Air Force consider this acceptable airworthiness for an airplane used only in training?

At one point, at a news briefing, an officer brandished a cheap pulse oximeter—the same kind we use in our crappy GA airplanes—as one solution to the F-22's ills. (At least ours can be hardwired into the panel for automatic monitoring.)

I'll skip past discussing whether the F-22 is even worth having. (If you want to discuss its non-mission, be my guest.) For me, as a taxpayer, it's all about the money. Bar none, the F-22 is the most expensive fighter ever produced. The flyaway cost of the F-22 is variously given between $170 and $350 million each, depending on how you crunch the numbers. (And the numbers are $64.5 billion total program cost, with about 184 airplanes built. You can do the math.)

Let me put that in context. It's eight times more expensive than the F-117 Nighthawk, 21 times more expensive than an F-16 and 12 times more expensive than the F-15. Just for fun, adjusted for inflation, you could have bought 537 P-51 Mustangs for the price of a single F-22 or nearly 50 B-29s. But enough of that.

It's a hugely expensive airplane with tremendous capability, but even at that cost, the F-22 pilots—and there are only about 200 of them—evidently have little confidence that it will keep them alive in routine flight, never mind combat. Really, we ought to do better than this as a country and the Air Force should stop risking pilots to cover its butt on an airplane that ought not to have this problem. Shouldn't they be going after Lockheed for non-performance on the contract?

As for Wilson and Gordon, I offer a tip of the garrison cap. I like to think I'd have the stones to do what they did, but I know I don't.

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As we all probably did, I watched and read a lot of coverage on the Bin Laden raid a year ago. What caught my eyes and ears was speculation on why the MH-60 Blackhawk crashed when attempting to land in the compound. We may never know the real cause, but the most-reported reason was that the aircraft entered vortex ring state, also known as settling with power.

This little YouTube video explains VRS, but the short course is that it happens when the rotor disc doesn't have enough clean air to generate sufficient lift to keep the aircraft from settling—it can be caught in its own wash or turbulence from surface features. It's the opposite side of the coin from translational lift. VRS is always a risk on the approach to landing.

Viewed from inside, it's a little like parachute mode in a light aircraft; a wobbly state of slow settling. It can be recovered similarly, by reducing the collective and pitching the cyclic forward to increase airspeed to get the disc into clean air. But that takes altitude and if there's not enough of it, a hard touchdown or crash will be the result. This video depicts what appears to be classic VRS. (Watch it to the end.) Sometimes, excess power can arrest the settling, but in this case, the trees intervened. And the heavier the aircraft, the more aggravated the settling. (The MH-60 was equipped with stealth hardware and was probably heavier than a standard Blackhawk.)

During one interview, former CJCS Adm. Mike Mullen said he watched the teams train for the mission in the Nevada desert with an exact mockup of the Bin Laden compound, but with a fence rather than the compound's 12-foot high walls. See the problem? A walled compound acts like a big bowl, reflecting the rotor wash upward and potentially making a mess of roiled air that would make VRS more likely. Since these teams have done these operations in the hundreds, the pilots would have known this, if they knew the target was walled in rather than fenced in. Mullen seemed to indicate that during training, they did not know who or what the target would be until very near the step off date.

That left me wondering if their briefing included information on the walls—I can't imagine it wouldn't have—and if so, did they decide the risk of unrecoverable VRS was low enough to proceed? Did they encounter higher density altitude than expected? Or are they good enough to just scoot in over the wall and plant it? That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Helicopter pilots, educate us.

One former spec ops pilot quoted in the Army Times said the stealth Blackhawks are equipped with anti-radar coatings on their windshields that may make it difficult to see with night vision gear. It's possible that VRS wasn't the cause at all, but that the helicopter simply clipped its tail rotor on the wall and lost control. Either way, you have to admire the pilot's training and skill to plant the nose in the dirt to keep a bad situation from getting worse. And to the SEALS for shrugging off the crash they'd just been in and getting on with business.

We should all do our day jobs as well.

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