Originally Posted by
tmiw
I saw this video on YouTube recently that goes into the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNUomfuWuA8
At ~3:45 into the video, there's a graph showing that the lowest pounds/mile fuel burn is around 3,000nm, which would take around 5-5.5 hours to fly at Mach 0.85. Of course, as also mentioned in the video, passengers (especially business travelers) really don't want to stop all that often if they can avoid it.
This is a really really good video that explains it well. It's mind blowing how much fuel it takes to move fuel.