The problem: Getting emissions down for airplanes is trickier than for other forms of travel. A battery with enough juice for a flight would be too heavy to get off the ground, and alternative fuels either don’t provide the same amount of energy as jet fuel, or produce more emissions when they’re made on the scale airplanes need.
The solution: Lufthansa is coating four airplanes in a film that mimics sharkskin to make them more aerodynamic. Sharks look smooth, but their skin is made of millions of microscopic scales that resemble teeth. These scales reduce drag in the water and lets sharks swim faster. Lufthansa is trying the same idea in the air, with scales a fraction of a millimetre thick that break up the layer of friction that forms when air moves across a surface.
Yes, but: Lufthansa expects this to cut fuel use by 1% per flight. That won’t solve the problem of airplane emissions, though it helps: on four planes, that’s roughly 2,650 tons of fuel and 8,300 tons of CO2, equivalent to 46 flights from Vienna to New York.