How can we make air travel greener?

It seems to me that we could solve most of our GHG emissions by switching to different forms of energy - except when it comes to air travel!

So, how do we deal with this one?

Is there anything on the horizon that would make air travel greener?

or do we just have to ban all but essential flying, perhaps with a high speed rail network as an alternative?
allen.re... Essential flying? What a very relative and subjective term.

I agree with you... ...I would sugest that most flying is not essential though.
A hydrogen engine sounds good, but are any in development? ...could this type of engine ever be efficient enough?
Trains would never be as fast as aircraft. If we needed to make the switch, slower journey times are a compromise we would have to make.
Nata T...

Hydrogen (H not H2) is a fuel. You burn 2 atoms with 1 atom of oxygen (from the air) to produce heat and water. (H2 O)

No pollution and no other fuels involved.

I agree that not all destinations are reachable by rail, In this senario, you would have to compromise on your holiday destinations.
Hopefully, solutions will be found and compromise will not be necessary. Hopefully we will not have to limit our flying.

What I am asking is, are there any ways we can solve the problem of pollution due to air travel, other than by drastically reducing it?
Nata T... sorry, I missed the point you were making. Of course hydrogen has to be produced before it can be used as fuel. It would need to be produced using electricity generated cleanly before it could be called 'green'.

hydrogen fuel

Flap really hard!

Stop flying and go back to sailing round the world.

How about everyone puts an arm out of the window and flaps!

Essential flying? What a very relative and subjective term.

go bye bus

we need to redesign jet engines and rethink the way they work what i would do is get rid of kerosene and have a jet engine that would suck air in converting it to hot air and using this to fly

HELL NO! No rail system in the world can match the flying speeds of a 747 boeing! your talking of speeds of 800km/h at average and 1000km/h if the conditions are right and you don't care about fuel!

The only way your ever going to get a train to go that fast is to super size the rail gun theory so it shoots the train as the projectile! Or by using nuclear reactors to power the train!

You could use hydrogen if they ever figure out how to make it efficiently. If you use rail, you could use electricity.