Boeing fighter to run on biofuel; Mastro bankruptcy trustee keeps job

Boeing is opening another front in the war against global warming, according to the company's marketing machine.

Enter the "Green Hornet."

Boeing and the Navy plan to enable the death-dealing F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighter to run on sustainable biofuel, and will eliminate ozone-depleting halon in its fire-suppression system.

Company employees learned this past week that the U.S. Navy has conducted the first test of an F/A-18 Hornet jet engine running on biofuel derived from the camelina plant.

The internal news item quotes Carrie Traven — Boeing's "alternative fuel/green lead" for the jet-fighter program — as saying that Boeing and the Navy have also made environmental improvements on the newest version of the jet, the Super Hornet.

This includes the removal of halon as the principal fire-suppressing agent on the aircraft, she said. (Production of halon has been banned by the United States for 15 years and only recycled halon is legal, so finding an alternative makes sense.) Still, outside the Boeing marketing department it might seem a stretch to laud the "green" contribution of a jet fighter that blazes skyward with afterburners glowing like twin suns from its rear end.

The two-seater F/A-18 is powered by two GE engines that each provide 14,000 pounds of thrust at cruise speed and 22,000 pounds with afterburners on.

While firing its afterburners, the Super Hornet consumes 1.74 pounds of fuel per pound of thrust every hour, according to the Jet Engine Specification Database jet-engine.net.

That translates into the plane guzzling almost 1,300 pounds of fuel, or about 190 gallons each minute it's traveling at top speed. That's three gallons per second.

In a speech last month at Jackson State University, in Jackson, Miss., U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus laid out the Navy's plans to go "green" and threw out the new marketing nickname for the Boeing jet, which he said would fly with biofuel within three years.

"We're about to test the first Green Hornet, our attack aircraft, the F/A-18," Mabus told his audience, the Jackson Free Press reported. "The Green Hornet will fly on alternative fuels, and I'm particularly proud of that, because cellulose-based ethanol can be grown here in Mississippi.

"The new generations of alternative fuels can be rotated with wheat in Mississippi and throughout the Upper Midwest, all the way down to the Gulf Coast. ... We don't have to be dependent on the more volatile areas of the world," Mabus said.

The Super Hornet can carry almost 18,000 pounds of missiles and bombs on 11 external weapons stations, including conventional and guided weapons for air-to-air and air-to-ground combat.

If Boeing's green push succeeds, at least that deadly rain from the sky will flow from an aircraft that pays some respect to the planet's atmosphere.

— Dominic Gates

Mastro bankruptcy

trustee keeps job

A bid by some of bankrupt Seattle real-estate developer Michael Mastro's "Friends & Family" creditors to replace the court-appointed trustee — a key player in the case — suffered a serious setback this past Friday.

In Chapter 7 bankruptcy — the kind Mastro's involved in — the trustee oversees liquidation of the debtor's assets.

Some of the Friends & Family, who had invested tens of millions with Mastro, wanted to replace veteran trustee James Rigby with Brian Ward, also a lawyer, who until last year ran a real-estate investment fund.

They didn't like Rigby's acquiescence to moves by many of Mastro's banks to foreclose on his properties. Rigby said the law gave him no choice, but Ward said he'd try to hang onto the properties in hopes that a real-estate revival would bring higher prices — and perhaps some return for the Friends. Ward's backers requested an election when creditors met Oct. 28 — a highly unusual move — and the court office that oversees trustees conducted one.

But in a report filed Friday, that office said that attorney Jerome Shulkin, a Ward backer who voted the proxies of 80 Friends & Family creditors, had violated court rules, including those limiting the solicitation of proxies, and so those votes shouldn't be counted.

Without them, the number of creditors requesting an election didn't meet the legal threshhold, the report said. And even if they were counted and the election deemed valid, Rigby got more votes.

This fight isn't over yet, though. Shulkin said he'll ask Judge Samuel Steiner to overturn the report. Among other things, he contends the ballots of Mastro's bank creditors — who voted overwhelmingly for Rigby — shouldn't be counted.

— Eric Pryne

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