Green skies ahead? Low-cost easyJet pushes for an "ecoJet"

British budget-airline easyJet grabbed industry attention the week before the Paris Air Show by unveiling a radical design concept for a green "ecoJet," one it said would set bold new environmental standards.

The low-speed, low-emissions concept has a composite plastic airframe and tail-mounted, open-rotor engines that resemble propellers. It resembles an internal Boeing design concept that company engineers dubbed "Fozzie." Airbus has also looked at very similar concepts.

Is there any chance that the replacement for Boeing's 737 could look like anything like the ecoJet? Is Fozzie on the fast track?

Depends on whom you ask. At the Paris Air Show, top executives at Boeing and Airbus weighed in with different responses.

To hear easyJet CEO Andy Harrison tell it, such a plane could be in operation by 2015.

"If the 'easyJet ecoJet' were to be made available today we would order hundreds of them for fleet replacement and to achieve the 'green growth' that our industry has committed to," he said in a statement.

Clearly, the airline's move was a good publicity stunt, an attempt to gain the moral high ground in the shrill public debate over carbon emissions and air travel.

EasyJet said "the next generation of short-haul super-clean aircraft" would need to be 25 percent quieter and emit 50 percent less carbon dioxide and 75 percent less nitrogen oxides than today's Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes Chief Scott Carson met with easyJet executives and discussed the idea.

He said in a subsequent interview that while he encouraged them to think "out of the box" and spark public debate, he's more than a little skeptical that this is a near-term idea.

"My experience would say those early concepts seldom arrive as drawn initially," Carson said.

The Boeing line on the big environmental debate is that the whole aviation industry, not just airplane manufacturers, needs to move in unison, making cleaner engines, designing greener airplanes and streamlining air- and ground-traffic management.

The open-rotor engine technology is being heavily studied but isn't likely to mature within the next decade, said Carson. So is an ecoJet concept possible for the 737 replacement around 2015? "No, absolutely not," he said. "The next one after it might."

Tom Williams, the Airbus executive vice president responsible for all aircraft programs, was more open.

He said typical low-emissions designs that use open-rotor technology tend to look similar because such engines are noisier than standard jet engines. That means they must be mounted high on the tail, with surfaces underneath that provide a shield to cut ground noise.

There are trade-offs in speed, noise, emissions and reliability to be considered, Williams said.

"If you wanted an unconventional design, it would drive you to an entry into service that wouldn't be until about 2017," he said.

Of course, easyJet is a big all-Airbus customer. Williams has to take it more seriously than Carson. Could the replacement for the A320 look like this easyJet concept?

"It's not so crazy," Williams said.

— Dominic Gates

On this wine tour, it's not your head that's spinning

Red wine and green power are combining to make a sell-out annual event for Peninsula Light of Gig Harbor.

Last weekend a bus with 52 wine-and-wind enthusiasts embarked on the electricity cooperative's annual three-day tour to Eastern Washington's wine country, where they sniffed the local cabernet and gazed at the region's growing number of wind farms.

The 24,000-member electricity cooperative has organized the pilgrimage every year since 2002. Increasing curiosity about the potential of renewable energy — and the growing popularity of Walla Walla wines — have made the tour a success, says Jonathan White, the PenLight executive who started the program.

"It's gotten so popular that we really don't have to advertise it too much," he says.

The trip costs $250 per person, and usually it's fully booked 10 months in advance. White says the trip helps co-op members become familiar with the economic impact of two of Eastern Washington's fastest-growing industries.

The experience of watching giant propellers in between vineyard visits has attracted at least one other group of enthusiasts: some Sierra Club members organized a wind-and-wine tour in 2005.

"My husband and I had not seen the wind turbines, nor quite understood what they did," says Donel Pim, 69, of Gig Harbor, who's taken the PenLight tour twice with her husband, David Pim. The enormousness of the wind turbines and the extent of the farms were "mesmerizing," but knowledge about wine also sank in, Donel said.

PenLight gets about 3 percent of its electricity from wind and is considering investing in one of the wind-farm projects, White says. The state's wind-power development has so far concentrated east of the Columbia River Gorge, which offers good winds and open grasslands.

Wind turbines "are very quiet," says Tom Mulledy, a retired Port of Tacoma treasurer and wine amateur who has taken the PenLight tour twice.

"You see cows feeding next to them; they don't seem to bother whatever is going on."

— Ángel González