By Bjorn Fehrm
January 22, 2020, ©. Leeham News, Dublin: The yearly Air Finance Journal conference finished its second day with a Q&A with the top executives of the Leasing industry.
The Leasing companies buy 40% of all new airliners from the likes of Airbus and Boeing, to later rent them to the airlines on a monthly basis.
With 40% of all new aircraft delivered to these companies, their view on where we are in the cycle and what are the main challenges facing air transport is important.
The main topics during the three-day conference are the state of the airlines, the ease or difficulty to finance the purchase of $50bn of aircraft per year and the growing issue of air transport and the environment.
January 17, 2020, ©. Leeham News: We continue our series why e in ePlane shall stand for environment and not electric, where we now examine the gains with electric/hybrid distributed propulsion systems.
We started last week with the type of boundary layer ingesting aft fans shown in Figure 1. Now we continue with wing mounted distributed propulsors.
By Bjorn Fehrm
November 19, 2019, ©. Leeham News: Airbus presented a real innovative idea yesterday at the Dubai Air Show to reduce the environmental footprint of civil air transport. In the future we should fly like geese, it saves both fuel and CO2 emissions.
The airframer is starting a program to explore how the geese reduce their energy consumption while flying long distances. They fly in each other’s up-wash. This is to date the most innovative idea in the airframer’s quest to reduce air transport’s environmental footprint. Is it the most unrealistic? Perhaps not.