英国首架“地沟油”航班试飞成功

Britain's first commercial flight, powered by sustainable biofuel, has taken off from Birmingham Airport.

英国首架使用环保生物燃料的商业航班近日从伯明翰机场始发，试飞成功。

The Thomson Airways¹ Boeing 757 used a 50/50 mix of used cooking oil and traditional aviation（航空的） fuel.

Thursday's 14:25 BST flight to Lanzarote, with 232 passengers, will initially² be a one-off, to allow a regular supply of oil to be sourced.

Thomson Airways said the scheduled flight would use biofuel on a daily basis from 2012.

Before then the company hopes the cost of biofuel can be brought down.

The flight was fuelled with 6,000 litres of processed cooking oil, costing almost £14,000 - four times the cost of the equivalent jet fuel.

Paul Kehoe, chief executive of Birmingham Airport, said: "Someone's got to be first and when you're first the experiments tend to be expensive.

"Once you ramp³ up（产能提升） production, the costs come down and more importantly the CO2 emissions⁴ come down."

The flight was originally scheduled to take place in July, but had to be delayed due to fuel delivery problems.

Thomson Airways said that in every other respect it would be a normal flight and passengers should not notice a difference.

The use of biofuels has already been tested by Boeing and several other airlines around the world have recently trialled similar flights.

In 2008 Virgin⁵ Atlantic flew a passenger-less Boeing 747 between London and Amsterdam powered partly by biofuel as a demonstration⁶ of the technology.

Biofuels come from many sources and those derived⁷ from waste products are considered to be some of the most sustainable.

Environmental campaigners have warned that some plant-based biofuels are responsible for producing even more carbon dioxide emissions than fossil fuels.

"We're going to have to fly less if we want to reduce emissions, there's no other way around it," Joe Peacock from Friends of the Earth said.