[jmoorebeek]

This sounds like a great proposal, and those 50-seat aircraft are the backbone of the mountain communities I grew up around in the PNW. Is there any loss in effectiveness in using standard atmospheric air (thanks to N2 and other non-oxygen components of air)? What do you do with the resultant H2O when the reaction is complete?

[stuart8ol]

Yeah using standard air gives you a performance hit - but it is preferred to carrying around pure oxygen from a weight standpoint. We just exhaust the H20 from the aircraft. There are other things you can do, such as condense and capture, but everything comes with a performance hit that we don't think is worth it.

[p1mrx]

> Is there any loss in effectiveness in using standard atmospheric air

> What do you do with the resultant H2O

I can't imagine why an aircraft would ever want to carry its own oxygen supply, and capture the byproduct. Oxygen is heavy. Are you thinking of a spacecraft?

[Qwertious]

>Oxygen is heavy.

More specifically, hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, whereas oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. For producing H20, that means you would have to carry 8x your hydrogen's weight in oxygen, if you don't use atmospheric oxygen.