Father, son to fly biofuel plane from RI to California
16, April 2016 – A crew of father and son are going to fly a Cessna airplane from Rhode Island to California next month, that flight is going o be an extraordinary flight. The trip of this crew will be special as they are going to carry something unusual in the airplane’s fuel tanks. The fuel tanks will be loaded with a renewable, sustainable biodiesel.
If the weather permits, Ross and Aedan McCurdy will be taking off from North Central Airport in Smithfield on April 16. They will be using a diesel fuel made from oil squeezed out of Camelina plant seeds mixed with regular aviation jet fuel. Camelina plants don’t take a lot of water or fertilizer and can grow in Northern Climates. Their seeds contain 40% of oil that can be burnt into fuel according to Ross McCurdy.
Ross McCurdy is a teacher for Ponaganset High School. He did a bio flight a few years ago to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The bio fuel used in that airplane was made from recycled cooking grease but the flight they are doing this time will be more special as it a coast to coast flight too.
Ross says that they are not flying experimenting using an experiment fuel but everything are certified and that will be their remarkable first flight. They will be stopping off at six airports after leaving Smithfield and before reaching Santa Monica to fill up their tank with 10 five-gallon drums of biofuel.
This kind of renewable, sustainable biofuel can decrease the dependency in foreign oil and is more efficient too. On the top of the fact that one acre of Camelina can produce 50 gallons of fuel. The common Aviation gasoline engine burns 13 to 14 gallons of fuel per hour whereas only about eight gallons of this biofuel will be burned in an hour by those engines. Thus the use of such bio fuel is really economical, environment friendly and effective. So the aviation industry is waiting for the flight of April 16 to be historical.
News Source: theavinews.net
