Boeing's 45,000ft cruise to ozone disaster

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New 'green' plane is threat to ozone layer

High above our heads in the upper atmosphere lies a thin, lifesaving shroud of poison. Near ground level it is a troublesome pollutant: but high in the stratosphere it screens out ultraviolet radiation that would otherwise sterilise the surface of the planet.

Over recent decades it has been under attack, notably from CFCs – long used in aerosol sprays and a host of other applications – and other chemicals that drift up to the stratosphere. They have opened up a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica the size of the United States, threaten to produce a similar hole over the Arctic, and, this spring, thinned the shield over Europe and North America by about 10 per cent.

This poses huge risks to health; the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has estimated that each 1 per cent loss causes an extra 50,000 cases of skin cancer each year. This has stimulated an unprecedented international effort to ban the chemicals – perhaps the world's greatest environmental success story. UNEP predicted last month that the ozone layer would start to recover "in the near future".

Boeing's sonic cruiser has thus come as a particularly unpleasant surprise. Virgin and many other airlines have expressed interest in the plane and Boeing expects to sell "several thousand" of them.

The controversy will be embarrassing for Boeing, as nine years ago it was given a special US government "Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award" after developing ozone-friendly chemicals for machining and cleaning work.

Two years ago, the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated that every 1,000 supersonic aircraft, which also fly in the stratosphere, would thin the ozone layer by about 1 per cent a year, suggesting that several thousand operating for years, as is planned for the sonic cruiser, would be devastating.

Dr Helen Rogers of Cambridge University's European Ozone Research Co-ordinating Unit, a contributor to the report, said last week that the sonic cruiser would have a similar effect to supersonic aircraft. They will also fly in the stratosphere to give what Boeing promises will be "a smoother ride".

Boeing says the new plane will emit less nitrogen oxide, a main cause of ozone destruction, than current aircraft. But Dr Rogers and her colleague Dr Joe Farman, who discovered the Antarctic ozone hole, says that, as a result, the planes would be likely to produce more water vapour which, at that altitude, would set off an even more destructive series of reactions.

The company says the plane's design is not yet finalised. It insists "the environment and the ozone layer are very important to Boeing".