alt Hacker NewsHm... I don't know that I buy your argument, since just as you point out, traditional jets are already very optimized. One would assume there's less slack to pick up.
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paganholiday • last Tuesday at 8:50 PM
Traditional jets have a long inventory and regulation cycle but for example retrofitting a A320 to LNG appears to save 20%:
https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:63b89022-ac68-426d...
Which still puts it behind the 787 let alone the generation that comes next.. But you aren't going to succeed at making any new inventory without every possible efficiency improvement to drive sales and retirement of older inventory.
Fuel is a huge component of the cost of operating an airline, sometimes the largest component. LNG is a much cheaper fuel, so I can see it being adopted for mainstream aviation eventually. Existing jets could technically be converted, though the conservative nature of aviation would demand many years of testing before use on commercial flights.
It's also a pathway to incremental decarbonizing of aviation. LNG releases less CO2 per unit energy than oil, and methane can be produced biologically or synthetically which offers a path to total (net) decarbonization.