Virgin Atlantic To Recycle Steel Mill Pollution Into Jet Fuel With New Tech

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Not one to shy away from difficult problems, Virgin has just announced that their aviation arm will be partnering with carbon-handling company LanzaTech to spread a new process for cleaner creation of jet fuel. Airplanes are certainly an efficient means of transporting people (more efficient than single-person vehicles, at any rate), but the sheer volume of fuel burned means that any slight improvement could bring about huge savings in costs and emissions.

The new process being promoted by Virgin isn’t actually any cleaner to burn, but the way it’s created is far more eco-friendly.

Essentially what they’re doing is repurposing waste material from other manufacturing plants, steel mills in this case. These mills produce waste gases and other junk that would normally be emitted into the atmosphere. Virgin and LanzaTech will collect these gases at the source and bring it to their facilities, where it is processed and turned into hydrocarbon jet fuel and miscellaneous alcohols (and some waste, no doubt):

They’ll be bringing the necessary retrofitting to steel mills in the UK, New Zealand (where LanzaTech is based), India, and China, and hope to have a “demo flight” in a year or so. They claim the new process reduces lifetime emissions (that is, from production to emission) by 50%.

I wonder whether this really can produce anything like the volume necessary to run a commercial fleet. Not that supplementing dirty-sourced fuel with clean-sourced fuel is a bad thing, but will it be more than a drop in the bucket? Steel, at least, isn’t going anywhere any time soon, so even if it’s a trickle, it’ll add up over time while larger-scale solutions are being pondered.

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Virgin America Unveils Plans for Next Gen In-Flight Entertainment

Virgin America, the first carrier to offer fleetwide WiFi in May 2009, will continue its commitment to in-flight digital innovation with the next iteration of its Red entertainment platform.

The new Red system, slated for a late 2012 consumer release, includes larger, high-definition touchscreen seatback monitors, full Wi-Fi connectivity and four times more entertainment content. It will also allow passengers to connect their own electronic devices to the system pre-flight, in-flight and post-flight.

“Red is still the most advanced entertainment system in the domestic skies,” says Abby Lunardini, VP of corporate communications for Virgin America. “Other airlines are not making an investment in in-seat entertainment; they’re just doing WiFi. Fleet WiFi will always be a focus for us, but our built-in entertainment system is still important, and we think we can offer the best of both worlds.”

Red usage has increased by 20% each year since 2008. Passengers tend to multitask in-flight, using both the entertainment system and WiFi on their personals devices, Lunardini says.

When the upgraded monitors and the new Red entertainment platform reach consumers in 2012 — the system is currently in development — the most noticeable change, apart from the larger screen size, will be the addition of full WiFi connectivity, providing passengers access to the unfettered web via the seatbacks in front of them. Although still being fleshed out, the new Red, as Lunardini envisions it, will also include applications for easy Facebook, Twitter and other social network access.

“This is a significant investment for us,” Lunardini says of the company’s commitment to reworking Red. “We want to stay ahead of the path … a lot of people fly with us because it. We’re an entertainment-driven brand … and we did not want to stand idle.”

The next iteration of Red is being announced Tuesday at the 2011 Airline Passenger Experience Association Expo in Seattle with Lufthansa Systems, Virgin America’s technology partner. Back-end testing of the system will start on #nerdbird, Virgin America’s Twitter hashtag-inspired Airbus A320.

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