Plane Simple Truth

There's plenty of good data on commercial airliner manufacturers' efforts to reduce adverse environmental effects. These include reduction of fuel consumption, which manufacturers have always striven to reduce, noise reduction, which the US government has forced on manufacturers for the past 40 years or so(since the introduction of FAR Part 36), and atmospheric pollution. Certainly the manufacturers (and airlines who operate the airplanes) are doing just about everything that is economically feasible, but the authors are such ardent cheerleaders that the book looks like a public relations effort on the part of the manufacturers.

In the TV show House, M.D., a premise that protagonist Dr. Greg House holds dear is that people are liars and stupid. Real life is often not far from House's observation. At the general public level, people are often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything. A piece I wrote on that issue, New York News Radio - The voice of bad science, details that. While it is too broad to call the authors of Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends liars; their mediocre research created the scenario that far too many took their research as reality. Known as the Peeters report, after lead author P.M. Peeters, the authors of Plane Simple Truth refute the wide-spread belief that the fuel efficiency gains in the commercial aviation sector are erroneous, which is the principle theme of the Peeters report. The aviation industry is often an environmental pariah, with environmentalists crying foul at the industry. But it is only a pariah due to flawed data that negatively influences the public debate, and Plane Simple Truth attempts to set the record straight. Plane Simple Truth is an articulate and extremely well-written and researched rebuttal to the Peeters report, and other flawed studies. The Peeters report flies in the face of reality, in which gains in jet engine efficiency over the last 40 years have been astounding. Contrast those gains with the popular Cadillac Escalade and similar SUV's whose mileage per gallon is often measured in single digits, and whose efficiencies have gone in the opposite direction. The authors wrote Plane Simple Truth as they felt that never in recent history has an industry been so maligned and the public so misled by so much falsehood and distortion that is beyond belief. With the Peeters report and climate activists pointing the accusing finger at the aviation industry, Plane Simple Truth is their defense. The reality is that while the Detroit automakers were making huge gas guzzling SUV's well into 2008, companies such as Lockheed had fuel efficiency on their mind back to the 1970's. In fact, fuel efficiency has been a key factor in the aviation industry since the early days. This is based on simple economics and physics in that for every pound of fuel, is a pound of payload that the airline cannot carry, which also costs the airline money. It is seen that that fuel economy is indeed a major driver of the industry. The bottom line is that fuel economy is absolutely critical in commercial aviation. Witness the number of aviation bankruptcies in 2008 when fuel prices soured. Like a first-rate defense attorney, the book defends the industry against its charges. In every chapter, the authors show the errors, both intentional and those errors of omission, where incorrect reporting and research have n