In the Tuesday keynote presentation at EBACE Connect, aviator and philanthropist Erik Lindbergh challenged the business aviation sector to step up its leadership role in making the industry more environmentally sustainable. He told NBAA president Ed Bolen that the Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation will soon roll out a series of prizes to incentivize innovation towards carbon neutrality through its ForeverFlight initiative, which is backed by the XPrize Foundation and its $100 million funding from Elon Musk.
“We will have multiple prizes to overcome barriers [to its net and true zero-carbon goals], and we’re not sitting in the back waiting for something to happen that we might not like,” said Lindbergh. “Europe is leading the way in sustainability issues and we in the U.S. need to move in that direction.”
Lindbergh also confirmed his intention to mark the centenary of the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 by his grandfather, Charles Lindbergh. He told the EBACE Connect audience that he aims to make the flight from New York to Paris in a low- or zero-carbon aircraft, adding that a hybrid-electric model will probably prove to be the most feasible option.
The EBACE Connect keynote session also featured advocacy for electric aircraft and new fuels and propulsion systems. Lindbergh, who is chairman of hybrid-electric propulsion pioneer VerdeGo Aero, encouraged business aviation executives to be part of this new wave.
“The advent of electric distributed propulsion and the ability to put thrust anywhere on an airframe lets you have completely new missions like eVTOL and eSTOL,” he maintained. “Over the next five to 10 years, these new aircraft will change the way we move around the planet, starting with short and medium-range missions.”
While the new aircraft are working their way towards service entry, Lindbergh endorsed Bolen’s call for business aviation to continue to be at the vanguard for adopting sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). “There will be new biofuels, and potentially hydrogen and other alternative fuels like ammonia but these are new and unproven,” he commented. “SAF has shifted from using palm fuels and now companies are taking fuel stocks that are more sustainable. This is the bridge that will get us to these other fuels and crazy new batteries, so we have to use what we have now and slowly transfer to what’s coming.”
