It's bad enough for some propeller aircrafts to be explained as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at industrial airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from increasing oil rates and ecological legislation, the race is on to discover viable options to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel usage in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too poor for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the household Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to perform research and development into the use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as strategic specialists for the job.

The most recent airline to begin experimenting with brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US flights utilizing a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is declared, can cut hazardous emissions by 10%.

One truly encouraging advancement has been the relocation away from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers thereby avoiding a price spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in usage of biofuels in cars and trucks triggered a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel consumption on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed blessing indeed if some people ended up starving just to satisfy someone else's green qualifications.