IATA - the scheduled international airlines trade body - is going to help out an experimental programme to fly an aircraft around the world, through the day and night, using only solar power. The Swiss-based Solar Impulse team is due to fly the aircraft in the last quarter of this year and make the global voyage in 2011.
My colleague Mark Pilling, who's Editor of Airline Business magazine, blogged about this and is quite upbeat about the idea from IATA's perspective.
I'm not so sure. As an aviation guy I'm delighted to see anyone putting money and effort into supporting the development of new ideas, but I'm not sure there is much synergy here.
IATA likes the link that this zero-emission aircraft has with the high-profile declaration by its head Giovanni Bisignani that the industry should aim to be zero-emission within 50 years.
I suspect that this attempt to associate air transport with this experimental work will be dismissed as greenwash. Whether it should be is another question of course. Solar power could have a role on large aircraft even if it doesn't power their thrust engines.
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