China's COMAC Completes First SAF Fuel Demonstration Flight for Domestic Aircraft

TapTechNews June 5th news, according to CCTV News report, a ARJ21 regional aircraft and a C919 large passenger aircraft of COMAC took off from Shanghai Pudong Airport and Shandong Dongying Airport respectively today. After more than an hour of flight, they successfully completed the first demonstration flight mission of refueling sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) successfully, showing the good flight performance of the two domestic commercial aircraft after refueling SAF.

TapTechNews note: SAF fuel is one of the main ways to achieve the goal of civil aviation emission reduction. The fuel is an alternative fuel produced in a sustainable manner with waste animal and plant oils and fats, oil, municipal solid waste, and agricultural and forestry waste as raw materials. Compared with traditional fossil fuels, the carbon emissions generated in the entire process from raw material collection to the final user use of SAF fuel can be reduced by an average of 80%. Airbus plans to certify that all aircraft products achieve 100% SAF fuel flight by 2030.

The CCTV News report said that this is a new breakthrough in China's bio-aviation fuel technology. The blogger @Aviation_Travel_Circle also revealed that the SAF used in the demonstration flight adopts the bio-aviation coal production technology independently developed by Sinopec, and the raw material comes from the so-called gutter oil, the leftover oil from meals. The leftover oil from meals is recovered and processed in the first domestic bio-aviation coal industrial plant built by Sinopec Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Company to produce bio-aviation coal and achieve green resource utilization. The volume blending ratio of this bio-aviation coal and the most widely used aviation kerosene (Jet Fuel No. 3) is 40%, and all physical property parameters are consistent with traditional petroleum-based fuels, meeting national standards and industry requirements.