Originally Posted by
LoyalToTheDollar
Thanks for all the replies! I fly regularly between MDW and SJC/SFO, but have never noticed a fuel truck servicing the plane. Then again, I haven't gone out of my way to look for it
I will have a closer look before my flight tonight.
I did some googling around, and it sounds like there's (very roughly) a ~10% penalty to fly extra fuel 1000 miles. In other words, a typical plane burns (very roughly) 1 pound of fuel to carry 10 extra pounds of fuel on a 1000 mile trip.
Obviously the cost would decrease for shorter hops, and increase (superlinearly) for longer flights.
If anyone has a more precise number than 10%, I would love to hear it.
A 10% penalty sounds significant, but I don't have any sense for how much jetfuel costs vary across the US. Given that WN does refuel on nearly every stop, then it sounds like jet fuel costs don't vary too much across the US? I imagine jet fuel costs could vary greatly internationally.
Based on the responses so far, it sounds like adding fuel (including hookup and disconnect) can happen a lot faster than I had previously thought! In particular, it is not a limiter to turnaround time - even at WN.
A followup question I had was "does WN take into account fuel prices when creating flight schedules?". For example, to prefer to move planes into low-fuel-cost airports after reaching a high-fuel-cost airport. It would be yet another variable to throw into an incredibly difficult optimization problem. But if refueling occurs on each stop, then it sounds like this is not an interesting question - at least for WN.
The wealth of knowledge on this forum is amazing. Thanks again for all the responses!
You may have not noticed the fuel truck before, especially if you were seated on the same side of the aircraft as the forward entry door, since the underwing fuel access panel is on the opposite wing only. Larger aircraft capable of longer distance flights (longer than a 737) have refueling panels on both wings for simultaneous use in fueling the aircraft for larger fuel loads associated with those longer distance flights.
There is no one-size-fits-all fuel burn penalty for the cost of carrying the extra weight of tanker fuel, as it's dependent on a specific flight's stage length, i.e. a lower number for short flights, and a larger number for longer flights. In my experience, the range can usually run from 2% to the previously mentioned 10%.
Differences in fuel prices between airports can vary as much as 30-50 cents per gallon. Back after Katrina shutdown so many pipelines feeding airports between MSY and MDW/ORD and everywhere in between, some differences were (temporarily) over $1.00 a gallon. I recall that event in particular, because one could tanker fuel into MDW all the way from SEA/PSX/SLC and save $4,000-$6,000
per flight compared on the MDW prices, but then again, it was an unusual situation.
Finally, it really doesn't take all that much time to fuel an aircraft. In any event, as a wise old dispatcher once told me,
"There's always enough time to get the aircraft properly fueled..."