Name: Can planes be made greener? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2025-10-01T19:11:55.000Z
Duration: 6 min 21 s
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Making aviation green is a huge challenge.

and we have to balance that with the fact

that it contributes hugely to global warming.

We need to be throwing everything at this problem

The first is that more and more people are flying,

that flying remains almost totally dependent on fossil fuels.

We haven't got green technologies available

and that's roughly equivalent to the total emissions

In 2019, airlines carried around 4.5 billion passengers on flight,

and we're really expecting that to grow globally.

whom are frequent flyers, generate half of all emissions

but rather a whole set of different options,

that we've added at the end of the wings,

and we are currently looking at much more features

from bird wings and bird flight and incorporating them

through a mixture of improving technology and learning

we are improving the efficiency of our aircraft at

That is definitely very little and it cannot continue forever.

So we definitely need to change our aircraft fuels.

Jet engines at the moment run on fuel made

from fossil fuels, so it's really important

which is made from plant based materials.

which exists in very large quantities and can be transformed

to replace the entire jet fuel used in the UK

Another possibility is what we call E fuels,

That makes it potentially a really good aviation fuel.

Secondly, at the moment, about 95% of our hydrogen comes

Hydrogen is very explosive, which poses serious safety considerations.

Designing, manufacturing and licensing hydrogen power aircraft is something

in the regions of tens of billions of pounds.

Electric aeroplanes are still incredibly rare.

Whilst it's possible, possible to make an electric car

that works well, if you put those same batteries

into an airplane, it's simply too heavy to fly.

to require a huge amount of effort from business and

from government, working together with the cooperation and support,

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Can planes be made greener? | BBC Ideas

equivalent

improve

potentially

sustainable