I am writing from the economy plus section of a 787-8 Dreamliner (free upgrade because I begged for a window seat), someplace just east of Japan, and this is the second post I have written about it. Something about being on it has inspired me to revisit it, and there are things to be inspired by.
I have been traveling for months, looking for good stories, and most of the stories I have found are more loaded with Fear than Hope. I am seeing a lot of Environmental Alamo’s in the Third World, but coming back to the first world, you see that something is happening.. that people are getting the picture, and that action is being taken so our worst fears are not realized environmentally, in part because unlike in the tropics, the volatility of the weather is serving as a huge wake up call to anyone who isn’t trying to ignore things. In the tropics, as with a lot of places, the weather is either creating more intense storms, or longer periods of dry clear weather from what I am reading and seeing, and this is something that people can shrug off aside from the storms, but the temperates are not so lucky. I skipped a winter in the northeast United States that was like a winter I did experience in Florida a few years back, the winter of 2009-’10 where every few days a new storm whipped by, the jet stream acted erratic, and record cold temperatures were set. In Alaska and the west, things were warm and dry, and although not as numbing to the soul, everyone could tell something was wrong.
So here is how the debate on global warming has gone: sometime in the mid 1970’s, a college Professor named Wallace Broeker was working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory along the Hudson River just north of New York City, which is part of Colombia University, and he wrote this paper:
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/files/2009/10/broeckerglobalwarming75.pdf
It was published a few weeks before I was even born, so hard to call it a new discovery. So after that, College professors started talking about this, but they were too late for the big environmental emphasis on air pollution in the Nixon Administration days. In fact, I’ll be danged, this was published a year to the day after he resigned, knew I knew that date, and the country was focused on government reform. So anyhow, who hears about this but just bunch of other college professors, and they start telling their students, like Al Gore’s professor at Harvard, Roger Revile, who got him thinking about these things, perhaps even before Broeker wrote his paper. I learned about it sometime in the late 1990’s from a professor nicknamed ‘Babs’, who was one of the cooler people I ever met in my life, not only because she passed me when I likely was undeserving, but because she was pretty chill, and allowed me to see the connection between our lifestyle, my tailpipe, the power plant downtown, and weather. Perhaps it was in an earlier class with an also pretty cool guy named Val that I made the connection, in meteorology, since I had to take three science classes to get out of college, and this accounts for two of them, but I remember it really clicking with Babs’ Energy Systems in a Modern World, which I took because it was close in character to my Social Science emphasis. So sometime around this time the Oil Industry started to take the threat of these Liberals seriously screwing up their profits like Nader did to Detroit and Rachel Carson did to Big Ag (thank you for smoking, by the way…), so they started to counter the argument before most had even thought about or contemplated it, perhaps sometime in the 1990’s, and you had the likes of Rush maybe taking a bit of baksheesh to still birth this idea to the American People, that anything we could do could destroy the inexhaustible layer of air I am now cruising on which is actually only like 20 miles thick (I’m 5-6 miles up, and above here the air is too thin to really sustain both the flight and combustion necessary to fly this thing.. smaller jets can go to 10 miles without too much strain, and some rocket planes might even hit 16 miles)… and all the sudden the American people were hearing about it, even if just from Rush and Fox lambasting the idea that anything the American people do that benefits their corporate overlords can possibly be wrong. Of course then Al Gore jumped into the fray in 2006 with the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” and all the sudden you had a name on the other side, a big name other than Conservative pundits, and the debate heated up. Soon after the weather started to get more and more inconveniently wacky, and even oil companies started to admit that Global Warming was Inconveniently happening, along with more than 70% of the American people, and things started to happen finally, but what?
That is what is germane to my current chariot, because there seemed to be a general agreement among the powers that be in the US that we would feel no pain to fix this problem. The last holdouts, the Koch Brothers (who have made billions on a family Oil Services Company and their guys in the US Congress, and in the Libertarian and Tea Party Movements (philosophically I might even like these guys, but I can give you first hand proof the Koch brothers are manipulating these groups for their own ends.) held out strongly against any pain being felt to reduce global warming, any national legislative plan to match the problem, so we were left with three options: Executive Rules changes, mostly Presidential Executive Orders ( Higher national fuel efficiency standards, changes to EPA standards), voluntary changes in the spirit of good will (I’m going to buy a Tesla because I want to be good to the environment, and have a car that goes 0-60 in 4.5, and because I can afford it incentives or not), and perhaps more efficient business practice (if UPS uses less gas by making more efficient routes and never making turns across traffic, they save more money on fuel), and incentivizing the so called free market to make number 2 more attractive (republicans will live with this if it benefits corporations they represent, and unlike at the federla level, states that lean liberal do set high gas taxes), like subsidizing or tax breaking low carbon changes on both the individual level (hybrid and electric car subsidies, home efficiency improvement tax credits) and corporate level ( tax breaks and subsidies to build wind farms, or ethanol plants). What is funny is that traditionally republican states have been gobbling up most of the latter, so what I am arriving at as a conclusion is that the consensus is that a few hipsters can ride the bus, or pedal to work out of perceived obligation, but the country is betting on improvements in technology to change what is argued to be an unchangeable lifestyle, e.g. I will keep driving, so an electric car will make that less destructive, so I will buy my way past global warming..
Will it work?I find myself now wondering if the Dreamliner is like the Romans figuring out that lead was in their plumbing a bit too late, or me obsessing about the arrangement of these carbon fiber chairs is a bit like the same process on the Lido deck of the now famous Titanic (although I cut a pretty good looking Leonardo DiCaprio look alike if I do say so myself!) as she slowly sinks away.. you start to wonder how much of what we offer as a modern, now increasingly economically united world, can survive more and more volatility through bad weather tugging at the margins of our overly tuned economies and ways of life… but the promise of all this is a promise of a better life.. we traded and continue to trade atmospheric carbon for all these promises like mobility, and fresh food anywhere, and entertainment and warmth.. I can go from Japan to Seattle in 8 hours, not the 17 days it would have taken in the days of freighter travel, and ask for forgiveness, but here I sit on the Dreamliner, and it is materially better, but only 20% so ( in essence, it uses 20% less fuel to do the same job as it’s aluminum counterparts, which in this case is to haul me and my pile of books, computers, and tropical and winter clothes home.
I do not know the meta analysis of it’s carbon lifespan to include production, which is a question for Boeing, but I would guess that they worked hard to minimize production waste and impacts, but I would have to guess that the production life of a plane is far outweighed by it’s performance over a 30 year lifespan, the energy used in which might be 30 times the energy to make the plane.. I’m flying to Seattle, maybe I pop out and ask them!), so I am still some 80% crapping out a shit ton of carbon to cross the Pacific, to indulge in the luxury of home after, I did in fact try taking a freighter the other way.
So here is the deal, airplane flight is by nature, since sometime in the 80’s or 90’s, undignified.. it sucks.. it has sucked since the days of
Frank Abagnale (on a DiCaprio and Sinatra theme!) and my dad bringing home gifts from the bar of the 747 ended with the growth of demand sometime 30 years ago. Waned away to all sorts of manipulation and second dealing (sure you bought a ticket, but that bag is too heavy!), and the lowest common denominator like Southwest actually feeling like a relief since you can at least be confident that their sardonic sense of humor is what you paid for, and they aren’t jerking you around for once with fluff in place of substance.. but here I sit on this plane that is only
20% better, but it feels materially better, like 50% nicer.. how so? OK, well, I like real facts after I postulate for a bit, it’s what I like to deliver so here goes, and these are first hand observations, occurring as I type:
The world looks prettier out of these huge windows (remember the plane is carbon fiber, so not only is it lighter than previously used aircraft aluminum, but it’s stronger, so the windows are bigger, like twice the size in area, and to save weight, there is no shade to jar you awake, there is just this dimmer switch that works some magic on tinting the windows through some physics and chemistry mojo that I can’t figure out other than to say it works.. there are 5 settings and when it is dark, I can only see lights outside, not the items attached to them, and even then just barely.) Why does the world look prettier? I am just coming from a Buddhist area of the world, so my best non scientific answer is Karma.. it’s better for the planet, so somehow you brain picks out trees and plants and the beauty of lights instead of just how many goddamn houses are down there and what a mess it is.. it was also a pretty sunset.
I have never in my life seen wildlife outside of a plane window in a modern airport, but I saw a crow pass by.. in the US, crows are not necessarily a vaunted bird, but they like them in Japan, and it was somehow beautiful to see him glide by, in a place I never expected. It might be because I think the plane has an electric motor to back it out of the gate, and it wasn’t making any noise, so the crow, or perhaps raven, felt comfy to pass by.. that electric motor not only saves carbon, it saves infrastructure and noise in a place you would never expect to care because it is so abandoned, a modern airport tarmac.. these are places that we turn into environmental sanitized zones, since they are devoid of plants that could get sucked into the engines or need watering, and just big sheets of cement or asfult soaking up heat and releasing it too fast, and otherwise just producing intense runoff from the intense rains it also produces as a heat island.. it was somehow a reminder of the forgotten tarmac to see that bird go by, perhaps a reward for the plane being just that much greener.
The headroom is huge, the plane is bigger, or feels bigger inside, even the door felt like a grand entrance. It could just be better design, the windows and other things conveying the effect of grandeur.
The stewardess handed me a non-bleached napkin. Maybe it’s just a bit of Japanese craft, but it’s god environmental practice as well. I guess now I realize I have had those brown paper bag looking napkins too, the heavy stiff ones, maybe on a southwest flight, and in some way they were saving money and chemicals, but this feels intentional.. it feels right… well, 50% righter.. the warm towel also didn’t come wrapped in plastic, and wasn’t disposable.
The plane feels like it does sit relatively higher up. I had to come from another terminal, and drove right by my plane, or what I guessed was my plane, and proved to be, since it had 787 emblazoned on the side. It seemed huge. Not like the A-380 or 747 seems huge.. when you look at the windows, it looks small, almost like a toy, but it seems so tall up on it’s landing gear it looks like a cartoon plane. The Logic isn’t so you don’t have to troop down steep gangways anymore, although that was nice.. all that pounding of aluminum plates you usually hear was absent, but the real reason has to do with engine efficiency… the engine has to be physically bigger to be more fuel efficient, so that means jacking up the wing. This one seems to start right where my feet are, and I know that the one issue they had with the first production 787’s was stress at that attachment, so there must be a lot going on right underneath the floorboards there. The reasoning has to do with a ratio inside the engine, the ratio of the size of the
air intake, the opening in front, to the areas where combustion occurs if I have it right. The more air you can jam in, the less fuel you have to use, so it makes the plane look like a gooney bird , with these huge bags under it’s wings.. it’s the only visual flaw on what otherwise looks like a find play-mobile plane, but there is one other odd detail:
The wings are wider than the fuselage is long… instead of a gooney bird, this thing is an albatross (which is specifically a nickname for an
awkward looking albatross, so not far off), and Boeing doesn’t mind that comparison because it is actually one of the themes of that
documentary I linked to in my first blog post. If you actually watched it, then a lot of this is repetition, but they were inspired by the endurance of albatrosses, since the 787 is a long haul jet, made for the big intercontinental flights, and what do albatrosses do but fly out to sea for months on end.. the wings come to a point gradually, are extremely flexible, and like I said, they are collectively longer than the length of the tube I am not sitting in if you include the maybe 5 meters of fuselage fuselage in between them (the wings by themselves without the fuselage would be just a bit shorter, maybe 2 meters shorter, but the wingspan of the plane overall is longer than it is wide, does that make sense?), but that’s a big deal, and seems illogical in some ways compared to the aggressive jets that characterize the genre of machine, like the fighter or the sleek Learjet. However, when you think about it, jets have big engines and small wings for not only maneuverability, but because if you have all that thrust, you can stay flying on less wing, since wings can contribute to drag.. the idea here here was to minimize the thrust needed to both take off (the plane is lighter because of the carbon fiber and a lot of smaller innovations, like fly by wire. There are no physical connections between the flaps and the pilots controls.. it’s like a big wifi node is flying the plane.. with a little electric engine turning what needs to be turned. Now, more than ever, I make sure I am on airplane mode!) and cruise (bigger air intake, more efficient engines, bigger wings).
So I just spoke to a stewardess as the LED’s dimmed by touch screen control to make us nod off more naturally, and she tossed me a few more interesting tid bits. When we took off, the plane was rattling a lot, all the light plastic that the luggage compartments and what not are made of, but as soon as the wheels lifted, it was quiet, and she seconded that, and added some more that filtered into my new-found knowledge of titivation of the last 4 years. Since the wings have such a pronounced V shape when in flight, the tips are above my head considerably as I sit here right at the back end of the wing root, (the morning after I wrote this, as we approached Seattle, I noticed that the wings were not only above my head, but even with, if not above the height of the aircraft. I had a connecting flight 3 hours later and the wings were half as bent high on a 737. The plane is remarkably smooth in flight laterally.. it ‘yaws’ less in the parlance, since there is a kind of pressure to keep it straight due to some aerodynamics I kind of understand but would have a hard time explaining, but you might intuit, from the v shape, so she said landings are so soft that unlike on just about every commercial plane where the stewardesses are taught to lift off of their seats just prior to landing to avoid repetitive stress injuries coming from their lower backs being scrunched all the time from the impact of landing, they literally do a little lift with their arms off the seat, which I have seen and chalked up to dainty stewardesses having a quite womanly struggle with flatulence at an inconvenient time. She said this aircraft lands so softly it isn’t necessary. I noticed also a little extra flight control surface, about two feet wide, between the ailerons and flaps, that seemed to be computer controlled, always moving up from the plane of the wing to varying degrees at all times, kind of jumping every few seconds, which seemed to be a stabilizer adjusting to immediate conditions.
Since I yawed into bathroom humor, the toilet on at least this flight had Japanese features like an internal bidet and bum dryer… that’s class!
The stewardess also said that it is quieter both at take off and landing, and that is a big deal in places like San Jose where millions of dollars are spent in noise abatement to maintain home values and quality of life (not sure in which order.. it is Silicon Valley!). Now that she mentioned it, it jibes. You could have had a normal conversation all through the take off we had (my seatmate, an old Japanese guy, admitted he didn’t speak a lick of English, and I know about 6 Japanese words, so it wasn’t an issue).
She also mentioned that because of the higher cabin pressure there are occasional issues with condensation coming down from the overhead compartments (better than a suitcase I guess!) but that it isn’t that often, but on a cuter note, something so Japanese flight attendant, she said that due to the higher pressure, there is less need for skin moisturizer, which many of the women who both work on the plane and fly appreciate, and maybe me too. Sometimes my nose itches like I was on a Mexican lucky bender all night with the old Robert Downey Jr…. when I get near customs, I feel funny itching my nose like I must be a mule stealing from the boss, but won’t be a problem on this flight.. the air doesn’t feel fresh like the west coast of Ireland, but for an intercontinental flight, if feels pretty nice.
I asked her if she showed up in destinations feeling less tired, but it might have sounded like a come on, so she didn’t quite answer, but I am going to guess yes. We were standing in front of a crew bunk bed area I have never seen on any other plane before, and maybe it seemed like an invite to the mile high club, if she wasn’t too tired, but she later did come and tell me that all the stewardesses felt better when they got to their destination, less tired, than on any equivalent aircraft.
So it’s approaching 3am at my destination, and I kind of want to walk around the plane still, so what is the upshot of all this? Well, first some good news.. this is the way things are going to be… this progress will hold it appears. They got over 600 orders for this plane, especially since oil and aviation fuel prices were out of control when it was introduced. The can deliver over a hundred a year I believe. Airbus followed suit.. it’s
A350 might even be better than this although they gambled on a
big Caddy, the
A380, over the Prius of the Dreamliner, so the spoils belong to Boeing for a little while for taking the risk, but them catching up is good for the planet, so it’s a win win I hope.. I once read that commercial aircraft makers don’t even make a profit on the planes.. it’s all in the parts and maintenance later, so this is like a gimmie anyhow.. although from this altitude I am praying against planned obsolescence! And now Lear is working on the first carbon fiber corporate jet, which Mr. Lear dreamed of before he died in the 70’s, but the way advanced dream of the time, not so much a dream as we were already using it for things like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at the time, but it died with him, and the end of the oil and gas boom days in Texas that seemed to so fuel that company, and a little company out of Yakima called Cub Crafters is making the first carbon fiber bush planes, and its creeping into gliders and ultralights, and will work it’s way up.. as of yet, I have not herd of carbon fiber in commuter jets, but maybe I need to look at the makers like Bombardier, Embrear, Cessna and Saab. Looks like Mitsubishi tried and gave up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Regional_Jet
But like I said, it’s 20% better, and it’s going to take 30 years for this conversion to take place, and Global Warming and Climate Change is making it’s presence know now, and every bit we pump in is overwhelming us, since the planet can no longer absorb it at the rates it was able to until more recently. So what do we do with that.. well, this is step one.. they built a plane that looks like a normal commercial plane, no Popular Mechanics stuff, and it was 20% better… battery technology will kick in and start to change small aircraft in the next 5 years in ways that will be impressive. If this is the Volt, that upcoming aircraft will be the Tesla. To that victor might belong the true spoils, the Elon Musk Prize for inter-leg sackularity.
But the reality is that there are 30,000 planes flying around the world in the commercial arena alone, let alone private jets and prop planes.. this does start to seem like a drop in the bucket to an industry whose share of Global Carbon production is in the
mid single digits, 1/20 of all anthroprogenic (caused by man) Carbon Dioxide and associated warming gasses releases, although it does come in intense spurts for the individual who does fly, with maybe a quarter ton for every hour flown, when the average american, the highest per capita carbon producer ( of the big nations, and not people living in remote places like the Faulklands.. wait, I stand corrected.. Australia passed the US in 2009!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita Does that now make us Northern Hemispheric Australians!? Agh… they dropped below us in
2010.. I celebrate too early!), uses almost 18 tons a year.. thankfully flying is expensive and annoying unless you really got cash and can pony up for private, which even most of the 1% cannot afford! Thankfully, since it’s impact is relatively higher, the difference between riding an SUV and taking the bus I would assume. And Jet’s impact is higher than their output of carbon because of where they deposit it, high in the sky. Climate experts are advising people to fly during the day when their contrails will block heat coming in, not at night when they will keep heat from escaping.. that is where we are getting to, ask the polar bears and the people of
Tuvalu and the Maldives. But who is going to tell the rich not to fly? And if we get the carbon fiber thing figured out, could we pack it with batteries and solar power our planes.. hmm… it’s a big chunk of triple a’s, and it’s tough, and ground transportation like electric and higher efficiency vehicles, even made with carbon fiber, has a better chance to make a more sizable impact more quickly on the carbon equation with this as a big luxury we keep tolerating while tightening up everywhere else first, merely due to the huge challenges of the range necessary to make the range possible on these aircraft to sustain this global economic and leisure demand. Sure we can use Skype and turn the heat up to a nice toasty 82 for a week every winter, sprinkle some sand around the living room lounger,mix up a mojito out of the freezer,, and dial up a Copacabana beach webcam on our eco color flat screen, but the rich are the rich, and the Bourgeois are, the Bourgeois, and they are likely to not want to give up the habit of flying since it makes em feel so damn important, and what about immigrants who want to go someplace new but still get home once in a while so here we are stuck. Try banning it, as much as that might make sense someday soon if not now if people knew the truth of the consequences of all this.
So hope comes in hoping this incremental change, which strangely feels greater than that because my knees aren’t touching the seat in front of me, and I can breathe the 5000 ft equivalent pressure air much better than the 8000 ft pressure (by now they usually turn off the oxygen and I am drooling on myself anyhow.. this is better!), and I can already tell I will feel better hitting Seattle than I ever would on a normal plane. So here is to hope that me paying for this is bringing the cost of mass produced carbon fiber down, and that when that gets together with batteries the world sees a real change, that this is a down payment on what our planet really needs.. because after this winter, god knows we need it.. and so do the Polar Bears!
now I am going to move this cool little swivel light out of the way ( did I mention the thing is pure LED lighting?!) and jack up the tough but light plastic leg rest, and finish watching this
Bollywood movie after I roam around a bit.. hoping I make you just a we bit jealous… damn this Japanese food tastes good! Metal silverware in coach! Wow, real Hagan Das! Saving carbon, one indulgent bite and flight at a time…thanks John Boehnor… now where did I leave that fiddle that EmporerNero gave me? bet it would sound great up here…
Cheers from the date line!
