Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Two airlines have announced they are raising fares to cover the cost of Europe’s new carbon trading plan, effectively passing the expense of the program on to consumers.

The move comes just days after the European Union expanded its emission trading system, which has since 2005 imposed pollution quotas on more than 11,000 utilities and manufacturers, to include airlines. As of January 1, any airline arriving at or departing from the EU must have sufficient carbon credits or pay a fine.

International carriers will be given emission permits making up 85 percent of the industry cap in 2012 and will have to buy the remaining 15 percent at auction, Reuters reports. According to the International Air Transport Association, the EU’s emission trading system could cost airlines $1.6 billion this year.

Delta Airlines, the world’s second-largest carrier in terms of passengers carried, said this week it will add $6 to the cost of a round-trip ticket to Europe to cover its anticipated carbon costs. Lufthansa said it will add a surcharge, but didn’t specify how much. According to the Associated Press, the airline says it will have to buy one-third of the certificates it expects to need this year.

The emissions quotas are part of the EU’s effort to curb carbon dioxide emissions and reduce the impact of global climate change.

The rules require all flights into and out of the EU to have sufficient credits to cover the entire duration of the flight, regardless of where it originated. This has outraged many foreign carriers, who say it is unfair for the EU to impose what is, effectively, a tax on that portion of a flight beyond EU airspace. Under the plan, a carrier flying from Los Angeles to Paris would be charged many more carbon credits than a carrier flying from Rome to Paris, even though the latter flight spends more time over Europe.

Several U.S. and Canadian airlines have joined more than 40 nations opposing the EU plan. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation prohibiting domestic carriers from participating in the program.

But late last month the European Court of Justice threw out a challenge to the law, saying the “emissions trading scheme is valid,” according to the Agence France Presse.

Now China is saying bluntly it will not pay the charges, which airlines must begin paying in March, 2013. The China Air Transportation Association is pressuring the EU to drop the plan, calling its action a unilateral move that does not represent a global effort.

“China will not cooperate with the European Union on the ETS” the CATA’s Chai Haibo told Reuters, “so Chinese airlines will not impose surcharges on customers relating to the emissions tax.”

India, too, may attempt to scuttle the plan, according to Reuters.

The kerfuffle comes as the airline industry continues its campaign to curb fuel consumption and, by extension, emissions. New aircraft and engine designs, such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A320NEO promise to dramatically reduce airline emissions.

But the EU wants deeper cuts in airline emissions, which have increased dramatically over the continent in recent decades. The global airline industry contributes roughly 2 percent of the total carbon dioxide emissions created by human activity. Recent improvements in airplane efficiency have not been able to keep up with increased demand for aircraft and air travel. This means the percentage of emissions from the airlines is likely to grow in the coming years.

Photo: Delta

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

The first of London’s next-gen double-decker buses is a hybrid that officials promise is “most environmentally friendly” and “the latest, greatest masterpiece of British engineering.”

Please keep your Lucas jokes to yourself.

The bus, unveiled Friday in Trafalgar Square, is the first designed specifically for London in more than 50 years. The Routemaster-inspired bus went from the drawing board to a fully functioning prototype in just two years. Transport for London awarded the contract for engineering design to Northern Ireland-based Wrightbus in January 2010. Wrightbus and London’s Heatherwick Studio have now finished the first prototype.

Editor’s note: Air France Flight 447 was en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro when it went down over the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people aboard. It took 11 months to locate the Airbus A330-200’s black box data recorders, and French investigators offered a preliminary report on the crash last month.

Wired magazine contributing editor David Wolman recently unearthed this Metafilter thread full of armchair opining about what may have led to the crash. When we forwarded it to an Airbus captain we know who is usually understated, he offered an uncharacteristically lengthy reply. Here it is, presented almost verbatim. We have omitted the name of the pilot and his employer to protect him from reprisals.

People have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions before all the data has been analyzed, especially non-Airbus pilots, which is to say the vast majority of the pilot population. I’m amazed by how many comments there are about what the pilots should or shouldn’t have done, what they saw or didn’t see on their instruments or what they should or shouldn’t have learned in training, and whatever other suppositions people come up with.

The key ingredient most everyone seems to be overlooking: The flight control laws of an Airbus. An Airbus has flight envelope protections that cannot be overridden by the pilot. This is almost always a good thing because the airplane won’t allow the pilot to overspeed, stall, overbank or overload the airplane. In the peculiar case of Air France Flight 447, the airspeed reading was inaccurate because the pitot tubes were blocked — a very rare occurrence in a jet — almost never happens.

But when it does happen, the airspeed then acts like an altimeter: When the airplane climbs, the indicated airspeed increases, and when the airplane descends, the indicated airspeed decreases. My best guess for AF447 is that the airplane was climbing, most likely due to turbulence; I believe they were in a thunderstorm. From a pilot’s perspective, this is a bad place to be. It’s rough and difficult to read instruments. Autopilot disengages due to turbulence or ice on the airframe or pitot tubes. The airplane is climbing, and the pilot is wondering what the fuck is going on. Then, as the airplane climbs, with the false readings still indicating increased airspeed, at high altitude the margin between cruise airspeed and overspeed becomes very small, so the airplane overspeeds — or so it “thinks,” due to the false reading. And it’s at this point, provided all of this is what really happened, that they’re fucked.

Think back to the Airbus flight envelope protections I mentioned, and the fact that the pilot can’t override them. The airplane computers “think” the aircraft is overspeeding and therefore continue to increase the airplane’s angle of attack. That only makes it climb steeper, thus perpetuating this cycle of increasing indicated airspeed and increasing angle of attack. This continues until the airplane is at a ridiculously high nose-up attitude and stalls, regardless of pilot inputs.

This is why we really need to wait for a full analysis, so that investigators can figure out what the pilot inputs were and whether or not they were consistent with what the flight control surfaces were doing. In other words, were the pilots fucking up the control deflections, or were the Airbus flight computers fucking up the control deflections? Because the airplane eventually stalled, I can only surmise that it was the computers fucking up, because when the computers do their jobs correctly, they increase angle of attack in this situation — again, regardless of pilot input.

So the airplane stalled. One plausible theory is what I just described. (There are other scenarios in which the flight control laws are degraded and the airplane can stall under certain circumstances, but that’s a whole other set of seriously complex stuff. Who knows though? Maybe that’s actually what happened.) Even if this guess doesn’t explain precisely what took place, it constitutes a design flaw in the Airbus that needs to be fixed in that the flight envelope protections need to be disabled if they’re receiving inaccurate information.

And here’s where the pundits really don’t get it. A so-called Transport Category airplane like an Airbus is not required to be recoverable from deep stalls like the one that may have occurred with AF447. They’re supposed to be difficult to stall, and pilots are trained to avoid stalls. In fact, we train to recover from “approaches to stalls,” not “full stalls” or “deep stalls.” So even if the pilots did everything they were supposed to do to recover from a stall, the airplane still may not have been recoverable once it entered a deep stall and exceeded the critical angle of attack.

That’s my best take. In any case, let’s not throw blame at the pilots before the engineers and investigators can sort out what really happened.

Photo: Associated Press via Brazil Air Force. Brazil’s Navy sailors recover debris from Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s been a while since an airplane maker has rekindled the age old dream of New York to Tokyo flights in a few hours. But taking advantage of having the aerospace world currently camped out on its home turf, EADS, the parent company of Airbus, used the Paris airshow as the venue announce an idea it’s pondering for the latest Mach 4+ airliner.

Aimed at travelers who may need to travel half way around the world and back in a day, the concept being developed by EADS is called the Zero Emission Hypersonic Transport, or ZEHST. We’re not quite sure how the three different propulsion systems add up to zero emissions, but it is an interesting idea.

The 50-100 passenger airplane would take off from a runway using turbo fan jet engines like a normal airliner. Shortly after take off the sleek fuselage would be pulled into a steep climb where rocket engines would then push it along to Mach 2 and more than 100,000 feet. Once up to the proper speed and altitude, ramjet engines would then be used propel the ZEHST to over Mach 4 (~3,000 mph) allowing it to link any two cities in just a few hours or less.

Upon arriving near the destination, the ramjet engines would be shut down and the airplane would glide until it is flying slow enough and low enough to start up the turbo fan engines. It would then make an approach and land like a typical airliner.

If all this sounds like a dream, EADS acknowledges some of the technology is still in the development phase. But like any good dreamy idea, it is not promising anything soon. The company says such an airliner would not enter service until 2040.

Photos/Video: EADS

Starting this month, Toyota’s hybrid cars might be arriving on a hybrid ship augmented by solar power.

We first told you about the Auriga Leader, a 60,000 ton carrier that can ferry up to 6,200 cars, back in 2008. It was retrofitted with a giant bank of solar cells in hopes of reducing CO2 emissions and fuel use while carrying mostly Toyotas across the Pacific.

During tests, solar energy made up for one percent of the ship’s total electricity usage — a small percentage, but enough to save 13 tons of fuel. However, solar power also turned out to be just too unreliable as even as a secondary standalone power source on such a large vessel, causing major spikes and shortages of electricity depending on cloud cover.

“Even a slight change in the weather has a significant influence on the amount of power generated,” said NYK line, the Japanese operator of the Auriga Leader. Engineers looked into expanding the number of photovoltaic cells on board, but found that just exacerbated the problem of passing clouds and storms. ”Attempting to make the solar power system bigger to gain more output and to increase its dependency could result in problems with regard to stable operations due to fluctuations in the power supply,” the company said.

Researchers turned to the same solution that land-based solar generating stations use to keep the power on when the sun isn’t out: really big batteries.

The Auriga Leader

The Auriga Leader is setting sail this month with hybrid power system that’s been under development since 2009. On board are massive Gigacell branded nickel-hydrogen batteries, developed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The batteries charge and discharge based on the power demands of the ship and the electricity generated by the solar cells.

The latest test is partially funded by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. If it’s successful, Kawasaki and NYK line hope to commercialize it to decrease the emissions and fuel use of cargo ships, which burn an average 120 gallons of fuel per mile.

In addition to the solar cells, the Auriga Leader’s diesel generator is also being retrofit to run on low-sulfur diesel, and the ship getting a ballast water treatment system to prevent the introduction of invasive species to the ports it visits.

The hybrid powerplant

Photos: NYK Line

President Obama has promised to provide 80 percent of Americans with access to a three-tiered, high-speed rail network within 25 years. About 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, and of course high-speed rail functions best as a link between major urban areas, so this is not a particularly ambitious goal. Still, the Obama administration has consistently supported high-speed rail, and the $53 billion set aside for it in Obama’s budget proposal indicates he’s serious.

Few things in transportation spending get people riled up like high-speed rail, but there seems to be some bipartisan consensus for it. Rep. John Mica, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is willing to discuss it. Although he routinely bashes Amtrak and considers HSR something just short of socialism, he has suggested funding go to the Northeast Corridor and its overloaded Boston-Washington line. His opinion counts for a lot because he’s worked closely with former committee chair (and HSR supporter) James Oberstar on several progressive high-speed rail measures.

Mica also will hold great sway over the Surface Transportation Authorization Act, the much-needed replacement for a federal transportation spending plan being held together with duct tape and baling wire. The bill, if and when it’s ever passed, would have a shelf life of six years — which happens to be the time frame Obama has outlined for spending that $53 billion.

Vice President Joe Biden, in a speech at a Philadelphia Amtrak station, said the funding would begin sometime this year with an $8 billion injection into two new accounts overseen by the Department of Transportation.

One account would be dedicated to rehabilitating existing lines, including “temporary operating support to crucial state corridors while the full system is being developed.” As Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic suggests, this implies the administration anticipates non-participation by state governments.

We’re already seeing this. The new governors of Ohio and Wisconsin have canceled planned rail projects amid fiscal concerns — despite Washington’s offer to essentially pick up the tab for building the projects and limit each state’s role in financing the lines once built. Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Rick Scott has rejected rail even though the feds have approved funding.

Earlier disbursements from Washington were contingent upon the states agreeing to chip in to ensure local participation. But Biden’s announcement suggests a new strategy is afoot, one designed to tempt fiscally conservative state governments into signing on to HSR: Since you won’t throw in, we’ll foot the bill until you decide you’re ready to do your part.

Fact is, building HSR is a very expensive proposition. A figure like $53 billion seems like a vast sum until you put in terms of high-speed rail: California’s proposed line linking the Bay Area with Los Angeles is projected to cost $43 billion, and of course major infrastructure projects never come in as projected. Revamping the Northeast Corridor so trains can move at HSR speeds is pegged at more than $100 billion.

Obama’s proposal of $53 billion over six years suggests the administration will take the same approach it took when it doled out $8 billion in the stimulus package: the Department of Transportation will solicit proposals from anyone interested in the money and award funding to a variety of projects to have the broadest possible impact. This approach encourages applicants to have some state money committed and suggest routes with high demand and at least a modicum of local support.

Most states, however, face budget deficits that, frankly, make high-speed rail look very unattractive. With many states cutting deeply, the last thing a lot of them want to do is throw money at rail. It doesn’t help that our roads, bridges and other infrastructure are crumbling beneath us. It’s hard to make the case for investing in the future when what you can barely afford to fix what you’ve already got. High-speed rail faces high hurdles, and will need huge backing from Washington if it is to catch on.

Although Obama appears serious, his commitment to high-speed rail will be sorely tested over the next year. The debate over his budget and the Surface Transportation Bill will be long and bitter, and high-speed rail will be a ripe target. Its success will depend upon how hard Obama wants to push the issue — and how hard opponents want to push back.

Photo: The Amtrak Acela Express in Boston. (SignalPAD/Flickr)