A team of European scientists is pioneering a mid-air fueling station that would allow up to five aircraft to get gassed up without making a landing pit-stop, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reports.

The Cruiser-Feeder system would give aircraft a new capacity to fly direct from Europe to Australia — nonstop from Zurich to Sydney, for example —  typically a multi-leg journey, the Daily Mail noted of the technique, already adapted by military aircraft.

Such airborne fueling would be done away from population centers and would likely result in "huge savings" for commercial carriers as fuel-burn rates would be cut by as much as 23 percent "for every 6,000 nautical miles flown by a plane carrying 250 passengers," the Daily Mail added.

The scientists developing the fueling system are led by the National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. It is their hope that flights would take off with much less fuel and once they hit a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, could be joined by a refueling aircraft.

The researchers suggest it would cut down on noise pollution near airports because plane weight at take-off would be reduced. The Daily Mail noted that "kerosene reserves make up about a third of the weight on long distance passenger flights at take-off."

The technique, said the website Aviation Pro, "promises greener aviation."

The high-tech refueling project is a long way from the very first successful mid-air refueling. It occurred in 1923 when an airborne DH-4B handed off a gasoline hose to another similar plane flying beneath it, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

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