special flights

A craft beer airline? Brewdog has a special flight planned

Fun Friday? How about a ride BrewDog’s beer flight?

The folks at BrewDog – a wild Scottish beer company with a brewery in Columbus, Ohio (of all places) – have chartered a Boeing 767 to fly a special beer-themed flight for its supporters and investors (called Equity Punks) from the London’s Stansted Airport to Columbus,Ohio in February 2019.

Check out this cheeky video for the flight:

Interested?

There will a be a special food and beer pairing menu served during the flight and plenty of BrewDog beers to sample, including a special limited-edition brew designed to adapt to the challenges high altitudes present to taste and smell sensitivity.

The round-trip adventure includes a four-night stay in Columbus, a tour BrewDog’s Columbus brewery, a visit to the The DogHouse Hotel, time at BrewDog’s beer museum, and tours of breweries in Columbus and Cincinnati.

Tickets are only being sold to BrewDog’s community of “Equity Punks” – but they’re also going to offer five plus-one tickets to contest winners via social media.  Find details on how to enter via BrewDog’s presence on FacebookInstagram or Twitter.

Virgin Atlantic’s heart-shaped flight

While I was hanging out at Heathrow Airport on Valentine’s Day waiting for my Virgin Atlantic flight to Seattle, there were lots of lovebirds getting their photos taken with a big heart frame.

Meanwhile, across town, Virgin Atlantic flight VS850P set out from London Gatwick Airport and mapped a heart shape in the sky as part of a training flight.

Pass the mustard: Qantas uses mustard seeds to power a flight

Airlines have been testing a variety of aviation biofuels made from everything from sugar and used cooking oil to corn and forest wastes to replace some of the traditoinal jet fuel on airplanes and reduce carbon emissions.

On Sunday, Qantas gave it a try, flying its Dreaminliner 787-9 on the world’s first dedicated biofuel flight between the United States and Australia.

The 15-hour trans-Pacific flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne used about 54,000 pounds of blended biofuel made from Brassica Carinata, a non-food, industrial type of mustard seed developed by a Canadian-based agricultural-technology company.

The ten percent biofuel blend delivered a seven percent reduction in emissions on this route compared to normal operations.

Carinata is a promising biofuel source, says Qantas, because it needs no speical production or processing techniques, is water efficient and is a good crop to grow in the Australian climate, either in fallow areas where food crops don’t thrive or in between regalar crop cycles to improve soil quality.

Expect more biofuel flights to and from Australia in the future. In 2017, Qantas announced a project to work with Australian farmers to grow the country’s first commercial aviation biofuel seed crop by 2020.

This wasn’t the first biofuel flight for Qantas. In 2012 Qantas and Jetstar operated Australia’s first biofuel trial flights using biofuel that included used cooking oil.