Browse
Engage
Research
SEATTLE, WA — Just over a year since Alaska Airlines began tests of a new emissions-reducing technology, the airline says it has achieved 35 percent reductions by reconfiguring how its planes descend for landing.
The results are the first to come out of the company's "Greener Skies" initiative, which began in June 2009. The tests involved the use of Required Navigation Performance, a technology that brings planes in for a steady, continuous descent rather than the current, step-by-step descent.
These "Optimized Profile Descents" allow jets to idle their engines for more of the descent, saving nearly 60 gallons of fuel per flight and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent.
By incorporating RNP into its entire fleet, Alaska expects to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 22,000 metric tons per year, and save 2.1 million gallons of fuel.
The company began using RNP technology in the 1990s, not as a cost- and emissions-reducing measure, but as a way to land its planes at trickly Alaskan airfields. Although Alaska Airlines (NSYE:ALK) is the only fleet in the United States with RNP equipped on all its planes, once testing is completed later this year, it will share the technology with its sister airline, Horizon, which will be fully RNP-equipped by the end of 2011.
With an estimated carbon footprint of about 2 percent of the world's total emissions, the global airline industry has been working on its impact for some time. In addition to Alaska Airlines' Greener Skies program, the European Airline industry launched a "clean sky initiative" in 2007, and committed US$2.3 billion in funding in 2008. In 2009, the international aviation industry set a goal of carbon neutrality by 2020, and earlier this year the German government proposed an environmental tax on air travel aimed at cutting the greenhouse gas impacts of flying.
Photos courtesy of Alaska Airlines.
Any aircraft that flies 3
Any aircraft that flies 3 times a day *CANNOT* have been flying very far. Therefore, it is merely a "local bus" !! As such, surely a *real*, normal bus will save even more of the greenhouse gases !!
Try again, Alaska Airlines !! Close but no prizes !!
You have no clue about how
You have no clue about how much airplanes get used. Pilots, like every other employee, have shifts. Legally, they can't spend more than 10 hours sitting in a plane, combined, during a 24 hour period. So that's 10 hours of flying time right there. A plane that flies three times daily has about 6 hours per flight, assuming an hour before and after each flight for refuel and restock. The planes themselves have no such restrictions on use - the only time they don't fly is if they are being repaired or there's no one to fill them up.
They don't turn off all the jets at midnight and park them in a big parking lot - they will operate 24/7, because airline terminal usages fees are actually pretty high, and just the cost of maintaining a huge jet means that when it's not full of passengers, it's not making you money. Airplanes have a 25-30 year life, but the depreciation tax write-off ends after 10 years - so for the remainder of it's life, you want to use the hell out of it to preserve your bottom line, since you can't take the tax deduction.
A 6 hour flight will take you across the US - more than just a "bus ride". If you want to go with "bus ride" flights, a 2 hour flight will take you from Seattle to Los Angeles. A typical airplane in any airline, doing just a point-to-point route like that, will fly it easily 6 or 7 times in a 24 hour period, and crew shifts will cycle out 2 times in a 24 hour period.
The great thing about that is that you don't have to take my word for it - just head to ANY airline website, and they make it very easy to see how many flights they have going into and out of which airports, every day. SEA to LAX has about 10 flights, daily.
I'm amazed at how ignorant you people are of economics. Small dollars saved, multiplied by large numbers of flights, equals big dollars saved.
Yeah that's not how it works
Yeah that's not how it works at all - But thanks for giving it a shot with some flashy industry terms and leave it at that.
"RNP" is not a technology. It's a requirement to existing navigational aids and comes in various degrees. For instance, RNP5 means you have to be able to guarantee you'll be 5 nautical miles from the airway's centre you're currently on, for 95% of the time.
A continuous descent doesn't even REQUIRE RNP1, it's just that most modern aircraft have it anyway (Not just Alaskan). You can simply start your descent at a later calculated point and start your own unpublished continuous descent, no problem. This is a perfectly acceptable, legal and widely used technique which has been in use for decades.
And did you really think planes use up half their fuel in the landing? 7 hours of flying and then suddenly we're using up 50% of the gas? Try harder.
It's amazing how you people
It's amazing how you people think. Firstly, this "innovation" is dirt cheap to implement - it's basically just a reprogramming of the flight controls, and some very simple pilot training. No major investment in retrofit technology. So yes, this will easily pay for itself - especially since the average lifespan of an aircraft is about 20-30 YEARS. Let's just take this as a raw savings of cost.
Gas is not cheap. Jet A fuel is currently going for about $5 a gallon. 60 gallons a flight saved means that the company saved $300. Your average aircraft will make 3 flights a day, so that's $1200 saved, per day, per aircraft. Considering that Alaska's fleet is 116 aircraft, that means that through implementing this one very cheap change, they can save $139,000 a day. Over the course of the year, that comes to $50,735,000. In short, it is definitely a great idea and one that's definitely worth doing, because any company that would deliberately NOT change, and end up paying that kind of money is destined to go out of business anyway.
Now, think of how this would affect the passenger aviation industry as a whole - 5000 flights daily! With a savings of $300 per flight, that's $1.5 million saved a day, or over $547 million saved per year. That makes this economically a smart idea, much less the fact that the reduced gasoline content (assuming the 60 gal per flight figure), would be a reduction of annual fuel by the passenger airline industry of over 109 MILLION gallons - or approximately 2.6 million barrels of Jet A.
As a measure of scale, this reduction in fuel would be the equivalent of about 1/2 a day of gasoline used by the US.
This is pure spin. A) There
This is pure spin.
A) There is no such animal as a green airline. I don't care how many stickers calming such you put on it the entire process is anti green.
B) RNP was what made the difference? Horse shit. This profile might look awesome in the sim but throw in a little center/approach/tower/weather/terrain/another aircraft and this is out the window. You are telling me that SEA or LAX or ORD or PDX or ANY of the places Alaska or Horizon operate into everyday are going to fit this in. Bull.
This is an article placed by Alaska's advertising department.
Lets be honest here, in the
Lets be honest here, in the grand scheme of things, this won't do anything, it will save the airlines basically no money. That amount of fuel is a few million a year, and when individual airlines are using 2+ billion gallons of fuel a year, 2m is a drop in the bucket. And the 35% stat is just icing, how much does it save over the whole flight, because that is all that matters.
Yea, I'm a pilot and the 35%
Yea, I'm a pilot and the 35% figure must come from the descent. There is no way that this can be taken seriously. The pilots are under the control of Approach control which tell them their heading, altitude, and speed to provide seperation and sequencing.
It sounds like a marketing ploy for the company... see the "standard" guide. What are you supposed to tell me? The plane just drops 1000 feet and flights straight forward, drops 1000 feet and flys forward, no way!
I would like to know why the
I would like to know why the step by step landing is standard. Has got to be a reason the big boy airlines have not bothered with making changes like this for landing aircraft. I am thinking Alaska airlines might be spending more to equip aircraft with as system then that system would ever save in fuel. I would not be surprised to find out this whole story is just an ad for the airline making people in the pacific northwest feel better about having all their airports locked down by an expensive airline.
A welcome step in reducing
A welcome step in reducing GHG emissions. I think the technology should be rapidly commercialised and extended to all airlines and airports especially in India. I suppose the RNP could also have averted the accident at Mangalore airport and saved number of lives since the exact landing edge of airstrip can precisely defined.
A 35 percent cut in what
A 35 percent cut in what exactly,the GHG emissions associated with the descent? I'm interested to know if the FAA will permit this proposed flight path, as I thought the step-down approach was "traditional" because it was required.