Collins Aerospace is working on short, medium and long-term solutions to tackle the challenge of reducing carbon emissions, according to LeAnn Ridgeway, the company’s chief sustainability officer.
Speaking at the Farnborough International Airshow in July, she said: “If we take it from the near term, we’re really working on what we can do with advanced air traffic modernisations, as well as what we can do with connected aviation and our data solutions.
“Last [autumn], we bought FlightAware and we’re taking all of that rich data … and we’re creating new solutions that actually allow our customers and airline customers to have more fidelity in things like the taxi out time, in being able to get a more trajectory-based arrival and departure, eliminating circling the airport and waiting on the tarmac just burning fuel.
“So we’re working with the operational efficiencies and using all that data, predictive health maintenance, all of that to bring richness and reducing carbon footprint.”
Lightweight tech
She added: “The second set of technologies we’re really focusing on is lightweighting technologies, and being able to bring new things like thermoplastics to all of the broad range of components and systems we bring to the aircraft.
“We’ve got a vast breadth and depth of systems on the aircraft and we’re really excited about what we can do with these new composites to actually lightweight, save fuel burn and CO2.”
Medium-term projects
Looking towards the middle term, she continued: “We continue to work with being SAF-ready [sustainable aviation fuel] on all of our products and systems.
“We’re very closely working with our sister business unit with Pratt and Whitney on SAF fuels and getting all of those systems ready for the near term. We as an industry all know that what’s holding us up is maybe more of the scalability of SAF, but our systems are already 50 per cent SAF compliant. We’re working towards that 100 per cent.”
Long-term goals
Turning to the longer term projects, she said: “We’re working on a lot of hybrid electric, and we’re very excited to be working on a lot of that also with our sister company Pratt and Whitney, and then we’re working on what we can do with hydrogen.”
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