The Green Journey

In my last post I shared about the Malaysian delegation’s visit to the US, under the IVLP / US State Department.

As the topic was skewed towards aviation (and the environment), one of the agenda of the program was the environmental aspects of airports and its management.

So, since we were already in town ….

One of the buildings near Dulles Airport in Washington DC

Danielle on hand to assist with the visits around the airport and meeting the officials

Massport, the officials who brought us around Boston's Logan Airport

Delegates being shown around the Logan Airport

As a non-pilot and not in the airports business, one of the things I learned during the Q&A during the privileged tour of the airport and runways, is- “What do you do with your de-icing fluids?”

De-icing: the process of removing frozen contaminant, snow, ice, slush, from a surface.

An American Airlines MD-80 aircraft being de-iced at Syracuse Hancock International Airport.

Definition and photo source from Wikipedia.org

As you know, Malaysia is a tropical country, and naturally residents like me, wouldn’t have thought to ask about this function, let alone what happens to the run-offs of such liquid wastes. But since among us there was a Malaysia Airlines pilot and an airport official, they were keenly asking questions related to this, and all I could do was try and learn about this operation as much as I could.

As we were told by the respective airport officials- Washington DC’s Dulles Airport does not collect the fluid run-offs, but Boston’s Logan Airport does.

In fact, from my personal observation Logan Airport seems to be more active in adopting green activities and efforts in their part in being green. One of the initiatives that they had trialled was wind energy. There was a joke about the array producing only enough electricity to power a few desktop PC’s only! But if that were true, their “solar trees” would have easily overcome this- they have a huge array of solar panels on the top floor of their open-aired car parking building.

* More about de-icing from wikipedia.org.

Other interesting points regarding this aspect of flying I had overheard was that even if a runway was de-iced ready for a take-off, if for whatever reason the plane was delayed for up to 45 minutes, that runway would have to undergo another de-icing exercise.

More highlights to come, especially the wind and solar energy use at Logan Airport..