How Airlines Are Powering Airplanes With Biofuels

It’s been 10 years since a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 flew from London to Amsterdam on the first test flight of an airliner powered by a mix of jet fuel and biofuels. Passenger flights in biofueled planes began three years later, and by June of this year, more than 130,000 flights had operated with what’s known more precisely as SAF, for “sustainable aviation fuel”. That isn’t to say that your next flight will be fueled by leftover oil from a deep fryer. Far from it.

2023-02-20T20:01:02-08:00December 8th, 2018|
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North Atlantic Tracks: Invisible Highways in the Sky

Captain James Basnett is at the controls of a British Airways Airbus A380 mega-jet, serenely cruising far above the stormy North Atlantic. More than 450 passengers are enjoying the inflight service, watching a movie or just sleeping away the overnight flight from Boston to London. Comfortably cocooned in the technological marvel that is a modern airliner, the passengers are blissfully unaware that their plane is just one of hundreds in a massive aerial armada heading to Europe from North America.

2023-02-20T20:01:05-08:00May 23rd, 2018|
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Reel Time

It’s been almost a century since the first, primitive experiments with in-flight film projection took place in an Aeromarine Airways Curtis F5L aircraft. It was 1921, and the 11 passengers on a sightseeing flight over Chicago were shown a silent movie promoting the city. But it wasn’t until 1961 that David Flexer’s Inflight Motion Pictures brought regular in-flight entertainment to passengers on Trans World Airlines’ early jets.

2023-02-20T20:01:06-08:00May 16th, 2018|
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Remote Access

Up in the air, there have been remote controls for as long as in-flight entertainment (IFE) has been in the cabin. Long before touch screens, control buttons for an IFE system were either installed in a seat’s armrest or on a tethered remote unit that retracted into a recess.

2023-02-20T20:01:07-08:00April 22nd, 2018|
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A Burning Question

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous portable powerhouses in the world of rechargeable energy storage, with billions of cells produced annually. Found in everything from wireless earbuds to in-flight entertainment tablets, their pervasiveness extends to the aircraft cabin – but maybe not for long.

2023-02-20T20:01:07-08:00April 21st, 2018|
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Guess Where I’m Calling From?

There was a time when smartphones weren’t smart, and you still dialed a call. Connectivity meant that you knew how to hook up a turntable and a cassette deck to the stereo, and bandwidth was the size of the elastic in your sweat pants. Then, in the 1980s, personal computers and mobile cellular phones disrupted the tech landscape, and airline passengers started seeing Airfone handsets in the cabin.

2023-02-20T20:01:26-08:00January 25th, 2018|
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Four million parts, 30 countries: How an Airbus A380 comes together

It's the middle of the night in the sleepy French town of Lévignac, in the countryside just outside of Toulouse. There are people lined up along the town's main road, waiting for a parade to begin. But there are no marching bands or decorated floats at this 1 a.m. event. Instead, a convoy of six trucks appears, each pulling an enormous trailer carrying a massive component of the world's largest passenger airliner, the Airbus A380.

2023-02-20T20:01:26-08:00January 24th, 2018|
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