If you were watching airplanes take off from Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston today, you probably wouldn’t notice anything odd about Continental Flight No. 9990. But during its planned two-hour flight, the aircraft will be burning a fuel made of algae and jatropha, a plant that grows in arid lands.

A-1, this is good news because airlines trying to modify their business plan by dramatically reducing their use of fossil fuels instead of, you know, charging passengers to not be hit in the head by a precocious twelve year old or something, suggests that their may be an airline industry in the future. Which is a good thing, because airplanes are neat.

B-2, this is good news because it means that, potentially, the airline industry’s survival won’t be tied to dumping huge amounts of carbon emissions into the air, and thus the people who could potentially fly on their airplanes may survive, as well.

C-3, this is good news because the biofuels they were using were made from algae and jatropha, instead of corn. The biggest problem with biofuels as they’ve been discussed previously is that they used food to power engines, and the food they used was actually a net-loss in terms of energy, because they didn’t have that much potential to begin with. Algae, which you can farm even in otherwise-polluted waters, has 20x time energy potential of corn. Jatropha has harvesting issues that need to be addressed, but it grows in otherwise barren land and also has a significantly higher energy yield than corn.

In short, this is genuinely good news, without much in the way of qualifiers, from an American airline, of all places. Hooray, 2009.