Dave Doogan
Main Page: Dave Doogan (Scottish National Party - Angus)Department Debates - View all Dave Doogan's debates with the Department for Transport
(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir Gary. I rise to contribute to this debate as an aircraft engineer. There are precious few of us—or engineers of any description—in Parliament, and these technically challenging debates are sometimes the poorer for it. Others have spoken about the need to support airports, and I fully endorse that priority. That effort is led in this place largely by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), and I am sure he will touch on that topic later on. Similarly, we need to act on the pressing need to support aircraft manufacturing and maintenance in Scotland and the rest of these islands, recognising the tremendous expertise that exists in the sector and the value that it has for the economy.
In this debate, I wish to shine a light on design issues, especially the twin problems of realism and pace within the design dimension, which I feel are not being properly addressed, much less owned. The UK Government talk an average game when it comes to net zero, but the investment and the road map have been pushed out almost entirely to make space for political rhetoric, much of it hyperbole. Perhaps if we put a gun on a new sustainable prototype aircraft, the UK Government would get their act together. With just a fraction of the investment lavished on the Typhoon multi-role combat aircraft, UK taxpayers could have a real global competitive advantage in renewable aviation businesses all over these islands. The absence of investment leaves industry to do what it can, which is good up to a point, because it is the industry’s engineers and scientists who will get us out of the inertia of conventional propulsion systems consuming fossil fuels and into the next generation of passenger aircraft, but they will not do it without game-changing Government investment.
I invite the Minister to agree with me that in the effort to get beyond hydrocarbon propulsion, batteries are intensely limited in their role. With current battery technology, they will always be limited to only a few hundred miles, and even then battery aircraft are some way off being commercially available. They are somewhat of a distraction from the real prize of engineering a solution to medium and long-haul transportation.
The Minister will know that the trouble with using batteries, not jet fuel, is that a craft that sets off with 10 tonnes of batteries will still have 10 tonnes of batteries at its destination. By all means, let us invest in short- haul regional aircraft—locked-up, prototype-tested, type-approved—and get them into service, if for no other reason than that we can then shift the focus on what we really need to deliver, which is a wholesale reimagining of long and medium-haul travel.
The rest of the UK could learn from the extraordinary work being led by Highlands and Islands Airports Ltd, serving Orkney and Shetland and assisting in the development and proving of short-range commercial electric aircraft. Nobody—certainly not me—doubts the potency of lithium-ion-powered aircraft, but nobody has overcome the critical weight and duration conundrums yet.
I know the Minister will not mind my pointing out that, like me, he is a bit of an aviation geek. I therefore have no hesitation in highlighting aircraft such as the de Havilland Comet, the Fairey Rotodyne, the Harrier Jump Jet and the Avro Vulcan—aircraft developed on these islands that represented a quantum leap in aircraft design and performance—all of which were facilitated by colossal Government investment. Where is that investment now? I do not know how much Government investment went into the now terminated Airbus/Rolls-Royce E-Fan X, which substituted one turbo fan on a BAE 146 regional jet for an electric fan powered by a battery linked to a gas turbine on board generator. It was not the last word in outside-the-box thinking, but I am advised by Rolls-Royce that it was a valuable test bed for high-powered electrical architecture on board aircraft. Other Members have touched on hydrogen, and my personal view is that that is the route out for us. I invite the Minister to set out how he is going to facilitate that.