Boeing is planning to expand its ecoDemonstrator flight test program for 2023 using a company-owned 777-200ER and adding “Explorer” aircraft. This year, the 777 ecoDemonstrator will be used to assess 19 technologies focused on sustainability and safety including sustainable wall panels in the cargo hold, a fiber optic fuel quantity sensor and an electronic flight bag application featuring smart airport maps. New to this year’s program, the Explorer aircraft will test specific technologies and concepts with the first, a 787-10 Dreamliner, slated to demonstrate “how coordinating navigation across global airspace jurisdictions can improve operational efficiency.”
“To support our industry’s goal for net zero carbon emissions by 2050, Boeing is expanding our ecoDemonstrator program with Explorer airplanes to test even more sustainability-focused technologies,” said Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Stan Deal. “We continue to invest in innovation that reduces fuel use, emissions and noise on our products and to partner with governments and industry to make progress on sustainability during each phase of flight.”
Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator program launched in 2012 and has used nine aircraft to date. The most recent, the 777-200ER, joined the program last year. According to Boeing, ecoDemonstrator will have tested around 250 technologies by the end of 2023, approximately one-third of which have gone on to be integrated into the company’s products and services.
Sustainability. Does it have to appear in every article?
Agreed. I lose interest the moment I see the word, Brad!
And yet you cluttered up the comments here rather than just moving on to something that interested you.
Only two sustainability articles are needed, the first and the last. In it, real scientists (not transgender scientists and similar clowns) tell you how much anthropogenic carbon dioxide affects the Earth’s temperature and whether it is a good or bad thing. In addition, scientists (not the eco-Talibans) are finding out what giving up fossil fuels really means for humanity and its future.
AVweb’s editors should also question the sustainability ideology and consider whether it is a real threat or the world’s biggest scientific fraud, the ultimate purpose of which (Agenda 21) is to destroy the traditional western social order. #climatehoax #ilmastohuijaus
How’s that tinfoil hat working out for ya?
OK, two curmudgeons and a Putin troll… Perhaps AvWeb can clean up the anti-humanist portions of Mikko H.’s commentary since they are not relevant to the basic complaint.
Efforts in the service of sustainability are – like it or not – part of aviation today; since the objective of aviation news is to inform, what’s not to be interested in these reports? It’s tech, pure and simple. Electric, hybrid, hydrogen-fueled, SAF, 100LL replacement, it’s all relevant, current, and technically interesting. Keep it coming.
There is still a lack of conspiracy theorist accusations. Everyone admits that the environmental friendliness of fuels is important and especially LL100 lead will be a big issue also in the future. The core issue when talking about sustainable development is price and real sustainability. It is often the case that more than one fossil energy unit is needed to produce one sustainable energy unit.
Only curmudgeons and green energy fraudsters try to avoid discussing the contribution of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to global warming. The outcome of that debate will also ease the pressure on the profitability of air transport. Therefore, the issue should be discussed with an open mind and not using Putin troll accusations. Of course I could use the names of John Kerry or Al Gore but they are not relevant to the subject. Anyway, free discussion is part of democracy, at least in Europe.
Maybe they have just been breathing in too many fumes from 100LL. Lead poisoning is known to cause anti-social behavior.
Thanks for calling it like it is, David.
AvWeb is just reporting the news. Boeing mentioned sustainability, so it’s part of the published story.
Follow the money. Checks are written funding “sustainability” all the time. Is every last nickel applied to the pet project? Hard to tell.
777 was selected for length of fuselage and its height above ground. This allows a nose mounted propellor attachment to a sustainably harvested latex bungee that runs the length of the fuselage. Critical element is the laser alignment device to give early warning of fuselage distortion during wind(up) power storage.
Most of us “old curmudgeons” have earned our cynicism from years of ludicrous press releases honing our bovine waste detectors. For better (or worse) GA is a community that reduces/reuses/recycles out of necessity. The irony is not lost on me that the popular culture “solution” is to retail therapy your way out of this and add to the waste heap.
Climate change generates a lot of controversy because there’s a huge gap between scientific knowledge of the mechanics of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere and the knock-on effects of this, and our normal day-to-day observations by people.
What we observe in normal life is the weather. Climate per se is invisible, relatively speaking, and requires scientific analysis to evaluate any change between the past and present. I’d guess it’s at least another order of magnitude more scientifically complex to predict future change in climate. Since people observe only weather and change in climate over time is abstract in the extreme, it’s easy to disagree.
But maybe we can agree on the following:
1) Since 1960 (the year of my birth), there are 265% more people on this planet than there were then (NB: despite the increase in traffic jams, I don’t perceive my world as being more crowded to that degree – another perception gap).
2) An increasing percentage of this growing number of people extract carbon molecules from the earth and reposition them in the atmosphere via combustion in things like aircraft engines, etc.
3) Carbon molecules, because of their relatively complex structure compared to nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, trap heat in the atmosphere by being set into vibration by infrared radiation from the earth’s surface, having been warmed by the sun. Nitrogen and oxygen molecules do not transfer infrared energy into kinetic energy this way, but they – like all atmospheric molecules – are set into a higher level of motion (heat) by vibrating carbon (and other) molecules.
OK, you must at least understand and agree with the science on #3, above, but I think if you accept basic molecular physics as true (and we wouldn’t have airplanes if it wasn’t…:-)) you must agree that the atmosphere is undergoing a warming trend under our watch.
And I think we can agree that an atmospheric warming trend on a planet upon which water is in solid, liquid, and vapor phases at the same time, there will be less water in the solid phase and more water in the liquid and vapor phases (vapor since a warmer atmosphere holds more water – right, pilots?).
This is the fundamental balance in question: polar ice, sea level, and atmospheric moisture. Although it defies normal perception, we are altering this balance by digging up the earth and pumping it into the sky when we burn things.
Do we agree on this?