Personally I think it should be criminal to use the 757 slave ships (as our friends at AA refer to them) for anything beyond a transcon or Hawaii.
These are the flights to avoid:
- Stuttgart-Newark
- Paris-Washington Dulles
- Stockholm-Newark
- Barcelona-Newark.
Those routes tend to be nearly as long as the plane's maximum range.
See WSJ story below:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...LEFTTopStories
Might need a WSJ account to view full story so here is an excerpt:
Dozens of Continental Airlines flights to the East Coast from Europe have been forced to make unexpected stops in Canada and elsewhere to take on fuel after running into unusually strong headwinds over the Atlantic Ocean.
The stops, which have caused delays and inconvenience for thousands of passengers in recent weeks, are partly the result of a decision by United Continental Holdings Inc., the world's largest airline, to use smaller jets on a growing number of long, trans-Atlantic routes.
United's strategy works when the winds are calm, and it allows the airline to operate less expensive aircraft with fewer cabin-crew members to an array of European cities that wouldn't generate enough traffic to justify larger planes.
But by pushing its international Boeing Co. 757s to nearly the limit of their roughly 4,000-nautical-mile range, United is leaving little room for error when stiff winds increase the amount of fuel the planes' twin engines burn.
Last month, United said, its 169-seat 757s had to stop 43 times to refuel out of nearly 1,100 flights headed to the U.S. A year earlier, there were only 12 unscheduled stops on roughly the same volume of 757 flights.