Beats Boeing, Virgin To Bragging Rights

Boeing and Virgin Atlantic have talked about doing it for months... but on Friday, Airbus became the first manufacturer to fly a commercial aircraft powered by an alternative fuel. An Airbus A380 took off Friday morning from Filton, England for a successful three-hour flight to Toulouse, France, powered by synthetic liquid fuel processed from natural gas.

Shell International Petroleum provided the Shell GTL (gas-to-liquid) Jet Fuel. The Airbus tests are running in parallel to the agreement signed in November 2007 with Qatar Airways, Qatar Petroleum, Qatar Fuels, Qatar Science & Technology Park, Rolls Royce and Shell International Petroleum Company to research the potential benefits of synthetic jet fuel processed from gas.

"After more than 30 years of development and a decade of operations, we are now building, together with Qatar Petroleum, the world scale Pearl GTL plant in Qatar," said Sjoerd Post, Vice President Shell Aviation. "In our drive for cleaner fuels, GTL technology can help reduce local emissions and encourage sustainable mobility."

Airbus states GTL technology provides real benefits in fuel efficiency and emissions... especially as GTL is almost entirely sulfur-free. The fuel may be sythesized using a method called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which can extract usable fuel from almost any carbon-based material.

The findings of the tests will benefit the consortium's research, and will likely pave the way for flights powered by other alternative fuels, such as fuels derived from biomass such as algae.

As ANN reported, Virgin Atlantic announced last month it planned to fly the world's first commercial jet flight powered by biofuel by the end of February. That flight, in comparison to Airbus' trip, was planned to be a relatively short hop, from Heathrow to Amsterdam... and will be powered by a biofuel sourced from either soybeans, or algae.

Stephen Vella, a management adviser at Qatar Airways, told The Economist the airline hopes to start using GTL on a small number of commercial flights in 2009.

FMI: www.airbus.com, www.qatarairways.com