Hello,

For openers, my 'idealistic' view is set in the future when there are no
airlines to compete with, when fossil-fuel is priced through the roof
or simply not available; planes don't compete.

By that time they'll all be burning hydrogen anyway. Can't build a
scramjet
that runs on oil. You really think that the engineers of the world are so
limited in their abilities that they will be unable to build an aircraft
that runs on anything but fossil fuels?

Well, I am an engineer of the world, and the problem is that gaz has a
unique capacity to pack a whole lot of easy to access energy (read, the
machinery used to exctract it is simple and light) .

Hydrogene has much less energy packed into it and would therefore require
much larger tank in aircraft which are already reaching their limits (if you
look at stats, a 777 or 737, or A380 have more weight in fuel at take off
than the weight of the aircraft itself!).
nuclear is not possible fo flight due to the weight of the equipment require
to gather the energy out of the high energy fuel....
electricity is not possible due to the weight of the equipment required to
store the energy...

We are already reaching the hurbard peak, and oil is only going to get more
and more expensive, any new technology would take at least 20 years to
become available to place in aircraft... wich china and india (2.5B peoples)
industrialzing, how much do you think gaz will cost in 20 years?

cyrille