Carbon Negative

There’s a problem with flying. Those noise makers that spin our props and power our planes come at a cost to our beautiful world. By burning hydrocarbons, such as 100LL and Jet A, it’s no secret we’re contributing to global environmental change. Being a contributor to a problem is no fun. Happiness is found in being part of progress, thinking bigger and being a creative part of the solution.

There are good things happening! There are many reasons to be excited for a sustainable flying future — eVTOL’s promise clean urban mobility, major manufacturers such as Airbus are innovating to produce hybrid and electric flying aircraft, the happening-now phasing out of 100LL fuel and Pipistrel’s Alpha Electro and Bye Aerospace’s eFlyer all electric training planes offer new visions for training with unreal lowered costs and better reliability on top of utilizing a cleaner energy source. However, most of these innovations are just around the corner and which leaves us wishing for something we can do today.

So is there something we could do today? Yes! It’s actually quite simple and easy through carbon offsets. A carbon offset is a reduction or removal of emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases made in order to compensate for emissions made elsewhere (source: Wikipedia). Confused? Think of it in simpler terms: like if you eat a cheeseburger and you then pay a farmer to buy a new cow to replace the one you ate. Make sense now? So, to offset the bad effects of our internal combustion engines all that is needed is to calculate our plane’s emissions in metric tons (tonnes) and purchase equal offsets.

I love this tiny blue dot we call home so to celebrate Earth Day 2022 I’m offsetting all my flying hours (including my students’ flying hours). That means when you fly with me you’re flying carbon neutral! In fact you’re flying carbon negative because I purchased more carbon offsets than needed, why not?!

Here’s how I did it: a quick read of this post by author Adam Fowler offers some useful insights to get started. Doing some quick math, one could offset 200hrs of flying a typical general aviation training aircraft burning 6-9 gallons an hour for less than $100 on Cool Effect. To calculate my offsets I used 10 metric tons (tonnes). The math works out like this: 6 gals/hr x 8.31kg = 49.86kg/per hour; converted to metric tons (tonnes) is .05 tonne x 200hrs/yr = 20 metric tons (tonnes) needed to be offset; pro tip: tonne is the same way of saying metric ton.

Is this perfect, no? Is it a way to be part of the solution today, yes! Already some airlines and at least one flight school offer carbon offsets, let’s make it a trend!