Boeing, FAA to team up for cleaner aircraft technologies

THE Boeing Company and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plan to work together to speed up the development and application of environmentally progressive technologies to produce cleaner and quieter aircraft.

As part of the FAA's Continuous Lower Energy, Emissions and Noise (CLEEN) programme, Boeing and the FAA each will contribute up to US$25 million over the next five years to conduct flight demonstrations of emergent airframe and engine technologies that have the potential of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and community noise, a Boeing statement said.

"By combining our resources and expertise, we believe we can transition promising technologies from development into service more quickly to help reduce the environmental footprint of airplanes," said Matt Ganz, vice president and general manager of Boeing Research & Technology, which is leading the programme at Boeing.

The technologies being developed under the CLEEN programme will be flight tested aboard two demonstration vehicles, a Next-Generation Boeing 737 in 2012, with a second series of test flights aboard a yet-to-be-determined, twin-aisle aircraft in 2013.

This flight-test programme builds on the success of the company's Quiet Technology Demonstrators, which highlighted a variety of noise reduction technologies during test flights aboard Boeing 777 aircraft from 2001 to 2005.

According to Boeing CLEEN Programme manager Craig Wilsey, the technologies that will be developed and tested during demonstration flights include adaptive wing trailing edges and ceramic matrix composite acoustic engine nozzles.

Boeing said it continues to take steps to improve the environmental performance of its products including the manufacture of commercial airplanes that are designed to be more fuel-efficient than earlier generation jetliners; pioneering research into sustainable aviation biofuel made from biomass sources that do not compete with food crops or land or water use; and developing ways to improve the efficiency of the global air traffic control network.
(Source:www.schednet.com)