Middle Eastern airline makes revolutionary flight

An aircraft has flown from London to Doha in Qatar powered by a fuel made from a mix of natural gas and conventional oil-based kerosene.

The Qatar Airways flight, which took more than six hours, was the result of two years of work by a team of scientists looking to reduce aviation's dependency on crude oil.

Several other airlines are working hard to find alternatives to crude oil, including investigating the possibility of growing plants for fuel.

Virgin Atlantic has already completed a biofuel-powered test flight using a blend of babassu and coconut oil, though the short hop from London to Amsterdam last February was dismissed by critics as nothing more than a publicity stunt.

They poured scorn on Virgin boss Richard Branson's claim that the flight was an important step towards finding cleaner, greener fuels.

However, Air New Zealand, Continental Airlines and Japan Airlines are testing second generation biofuels, which they claim are 'greener' than crude oil and, unlike the fuels used in the Virgin test flight, do not compete with food crops for land.

The Qatar Airways flight used a 50:50 blend of synthetic Gas to Liquids (GTL) kerosene and conventional oil-based kerosene fuel. The blend, produced by Shell, is known as GTL Jet Fuel.

Qatar claims that GTL burns with lower sulphur dioxide and lower emissions than pure conventional oil-based kerosene, which means it should improve the air quality at busy airports.

Qatar, the world's largest producer of GTL, aims to produce enough GTL Jet Fuel to power 4,000 round-the-world flights by 2012.

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