Phantom Eye – The Boeing Hydrogen Plane
With all the focus on hydrogen cars, the modern plane has been left out. The Phantom Eye, the new Boeing hydrogen plane will surely change that.Planes are infamous for not exactly being fuel efficient. That being said, they are not seen as a huge fuel waster overall. This is primarily because there simply are not a lot of them in comparison to vehicles. Still, the idea of building a fleet of hydrogen planes is attractive and Boeing is making headway in the area.
The Phantom Eye may carry the Boeing name, but you will not find a Boeing power plant in it. Ready to be surprised? The hydrogen engines are made by…Ford. There are two 2.3 liter, four cylinder engines that each produce roughly 150 horsepower. As you can imagine, this means the plane is incredibly lightweight. It also means that there is no way in a blue moon that this plane would ever carry passengers.
What should we make of the Boeing hydrogen effort? Well, the Phantom Eye looks for all the world like a future military monitoring plane. With a payload capacity of only 450 pounds, it is hard to imagine this being used to target terrorists and such in Afghanistan, but a flight range of four days certainly has applications.
Will the Phantom Eye ever evolve into a commercial application? Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this could occur. About the only thing the Phantom proves is you can carry a hydrogen fuel load into the air.
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