KLM Royal Dutch Airlines conducts world’s first passenger flight using biofuel in one of four engines of a Boeing 747

A Boeing 747 aircraft of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has successfully demonstrated the use of biofuel on the first passenger flight in the world using biofuel.

This test-flight, according to KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, was also the first of any kind in Europe that was powered partly by sustainable biofuel.

The Boeing 747 plane, with one of its 4 engines powered by a mix of 50% sustainable kerosene and 50% normal aviation fuel, circled the Netherlands for one hour.

The test-flight had about 40 passengers onboard, including Peter Hartman, president and CEO of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Maria van der Hoeven, Economic Affairs Minister of the Netherlands, Johan van de Gronden, director of the nature group WWF in the Netherlands, as well as journalists.

The biofuel for the flight, made from the plant called camelina, was sourced from a biotechnology firm based in Seattle, the United States, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines said in a statement.

After the successful test-flight – which took off from and landed at Schiphol Airport, near Amsterdam – Peter Hartman, president and CEO of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, told a news conference that governments, the aviation industry and society at large should now “join forces to ensure that we quickly gain access to a continuous supply of biofuel.”

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines said the airline has “compensated” the footprint of having transported the biofuel from the United States to Amsterdam, while pointing out the company’s current aimed at cutting emissions of carbon dioxide.

However, the statement from the company added, its pursuit of bio-kerosene is linked to not causing damage to forests or food and water sources.

The airline said that right now it cannot name any targets for changing over to biofuel for its commercial flights, citing as the main reason the difficulty in getting biofuels.

The demonstration test-flight conducted by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is the 5^th test-flight using a blend of biofuel and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) in the last 2 years.

Like the earlier flights using biofuel conducted by Air New Zealand, Continental Airlines and Japan Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines used for its test-flight the sustainable jet fuel manufactured by UOP, a subsidiary of the United States-based Honeywell International Incorporated.

In recent years, the aviation industry worldwide has been supporting development of eco-friendly fuels derived from plants as an alternative to the aviation turbine fuel. The developers of the biofuels are taking care to use plants that have a high content of energy but are not consumed as food and the cultivation of which do not displace food crops.

One report released recently, which provided the details of the results of the test-flights conducted by Japan Airlines, Air New Zealand and Continental Airlines, had stressed that the biofuel blends are more efficient than the conventional jet fuels.