FAA exemption allows cargo to travel in passenger seats
After Airlines for America, a trade association representing the airline industry, filed paperwork asking for an exemption to the rules regarding aircrafts being able to carry goods on the seats of passenger planes on April 23rd , the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that this exemption has been issued. This means aircrafts will be allowed to carry cargo on the seats in the cabin of a passenger airplane if there are no passengers on board. The decision has been made to facilitate the movement of goods during the coronavirus pandemic, the agency said.
“This builds on FAA guidance allowing the carriage of cargo in overhead bins, under seats and in storage closets on passenger aircraft used in cargo-only flights,” according to a spokesperson for Airlines for America. “It will allow U.S. airlines to further augment the cargo capacity normally provided by passenger flights and support emergency response efforts.” Guidance was originally provided to airlines by the FAA, but it didn’t include details on carrying items in the seats of a passenger airline.
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Companies Lean on Freight Technology to Untangle Scrambled Supply Chains
Technology designed to streamline supply chains in a world before COVID-19 is helping businesses cope with upheaval caused by the coronavirus. This includes issues from providing help adjusting to volatile swings in demand to tracking delivery of critical supplies.
Analysts suggest that the market for this type of technology is taking off as companies scramble to adjust their logistics operations to cope with increasingly strained supply chains. So-called visibility technology, for example, which uses sensors to track the location of trucks or the temperature of high-value goods, has “become a necessity” amid pandemic-driven lockdowns, demand spikes and supply disruptions, according to Bart De Muynck, a vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He continued that companies which already had this type of technology in place have been relying more heavily on these tools throughout the pandemic.
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Maersk, Orsted and other Danish companies team up to produce sustainable fuels on a large scale
Several major Danish firms, including Orsted and Moller-Maersk, have formed a partnership aiming to produce sustainable fuels on an industrial scale. The goal of the partnership, which other members include Copenhagen Airports, DSV Panalpina, DFDS and Scandinavian airline SAS, is to establish a large facility that will provide fuels for maritime, air and road transport in the Copenhagen area. In an announcement, the companies said that a hydrogen and e-fuel production site could be up and running by 2023 and fully scaled-up by 2030, and it would have the capacity to generate over 250,000 metric tons of fuel annually.
It’s envisaged that the scheme’s electrolyser, the piece of technology needed to generate the hydrogen, will be powered by offshore wind installations. However, there are some challenges when producing the hydrogen needed for fuel cells used in transportation. As the U.S. Department of Energy has noted, hydrogen does not usually “exist by itself in nature” and needs to be generated from compounds containing it.
If all goes to plan, the Danish project could provide hydrogen to public buses as well as trucks, renewable methanol for ships, and e-kerosene for planes and other air transport flying from Copenhagen Airport.
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Have a great and safe weekend!
