Random reminder

Press, 20 April 1979, Page 20

Random reminder

HIE LIGNITE LINE

The president of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Professor Lewis Crabtree, told the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science recently that in 20 years’ time, jetliners might be fuelled by coal. This is an extraodinary claim, and confirms the belief we have long held that, far from progressing, the world is actually going backwards. The romance of steam is ail very well, but who really wants to return to the days when half-naked teams of stokers had to shovel blindly and sweatily for hours on end in order to keep ships on the move? We acknowledge that there are lots of advantages to coal as a fuel, one being that most of it is not situated in the Middle East, and in fact we have quite a lot of it in this country. But what sort of conditions are stokers going to have to labour under in jetliners? In the first place, where will they 1

11 go? If jetliners have to install huge, >! coal-fuelled engines, complete with 1; stokers, then surely the baggage i I allowance will have to be reduced to f (an allocation so paltry that when ~ travelling by jet, one will be obliged ' to send one's luggage on by sea, with 11 al] the problems attendant thereon. 11 And another problem is altitude. At 11 the height at which most jets fly : i nowadays, stokers, who would ! necessarily have to be working outside ; I the pressurised cabin, would perish I from cold and oxygen starvation. Which means that the jets will have to fly far lower, belching out great clouds of sooty smoke as they do so. ; No, rather than have jetliners : fuelled by coal, we would prefer to see a further step backward taken, and have them powered by wind. The only danger here, of course, is that a windpowered jetliner ■. which became becalmed would drop out of the sky pike a stone. But then, they do that 1 now, anyway.