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Why are current air travel prices unsustainable? I was recently trying to find out why Norwegian Airlines had flights from LAX <-> Sweden, Finland, or Norway f

Why are current air travel prices unsustainable? I was recently trying to find out why Norwegian Airlines had flights from LAX <-> Sweden, Finland, or Norway for less than $400 and the best answer I could come up with was the improved fuel economy of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Let's take a 747-400, which (I think) could be used for such a flight. It takes up to 660 passengers, and every single one of them would have to pay $700 to just cover the fuel costs. That is, in 2008 fuel prices[0]. And you still have to pay the pilots, flight attendants, ground crews and somehow keep the lights on on the airport. Tickets for normal travelers are ridiculously underpriced; the reason airlines stay alive is a combination of government subsidies, business tickets being much more expensive, and all those annoying ticket pricing schemes - from trying to trick you into buying insurance, through prices increasing when you refresh the site in your browser, to crazy rebooking fees, etc. Fuel prices aren't going to go down in the long run, even only if because we will have to start dealing with climate change eventually; some politicians are bound to regain minimum of sanity at some point and price the issue into fuel. Meanwhile, air crews all over the world are going on strike because of low pay and cuts. At the same time, passengers want to fly more and for less. The era of cheap air travel is bound to end soon, and I doubt even Ryanair can invent many more annoying ways to make additional money on the side to compensate for the ticket price. [0] - http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/3986572/ http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  There's no way it would take $700/passenger for fuel to fly from LAX to Northern Europe.. Even if you do assume a 747-400.. Add an hour for a flight from LAX to London and you get ~12hrs flight time to get to Sweden or Denmark. Some approx numbers: 1,000kg for taxi / rollout, 15,000kg to take off and get to cruising altitude, 10,000kg/hr average at altitude, another 5,000kg for landing/taxi.. You'd be looking at roughly 125,000kg of fuel burned for a flight of that distance. A gallon of Jet A weighs ~3.1kg which would correspond to roughly 40,000 gallons of fuel per flight. The average cost of Jet-A as paid by commercial airlines in 2015 is $2/gallon. [1] In summary, it would cost about $80,000 in fuel for that flight, if you had a 90% full airliner of 600 people, the per-ticket fuel cost is only $133. Wiki confirms the approximate numbers where they list the 747-400 at 72mi/us gallon/seat (only showing 415 seats on the airplane). A 5,500-mile flight from LAX to Sweden would then take 31,000 gallons of fuel, which again at $2 would cost $62,000 or $150/seat. [1] - http://www.transtats.bts.gov/fuel.asp http://www.transtats.bts.gov/fuel.asp [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Long_haul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Long_...

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Let's take a 747-400, which (I think) could be used for such a flight. It takes up to 660 passengers, and every single one of them would have to pay $700 to just cover the fuel costs. That is, in 2008 fuel prices[0]. And you still have to pay the pilots, flight attendants, ground crews and somehow keep the lights on on the airport. Tickets for normal travelers are ridiculously underpriced; the reason airlines stay alive is a combination of government subsidies, business tickets being much more expensive, and all those annoying ticket pricing schemes - from trying to trick you into buying insurance, through prices increasing when you refresh the site in your browser, to crazy rebooking fees, etc. Fuel prices aren't going to go down in the long run, even only if because we will have to start dealing with climate change eventually; some politicians are bound to regain minimum of sanity at some point and price the issue into fuel. Meanwhile, air crews all over the world are going on strike because of low pay and cuts. At the same time, passengers want to fly more and for less. The era of cheap air travel is bound to end soon, and I doubt even Ryanair can invent many more annoying ways to make additional money on the side to compensate for the ticket price. [0] - http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/3986572/ http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

mikeyouse 11y ago
There's no way it would take $700/passenger for fuel to fly from LAX to Northern Europe.. Even if you do assume a 747-400.. Add an hour for a flight from LAX to London and you get ~12hrs flight time to get to Sweden or Denmark. Some approx numbers: 1,000kg for taxi / rollout, 15,000kg to take off and get to cruising altitude, 10,000kg/hr average at altitude, another 5,000kg for landing/taxi.. You'd be looking at roughly 125,000kg of fuel burned for a flight of that distance. A gallon of Jet A weighs ~3.1kg which would correspond to roughly 40,000 gallons of fuel per flight. The average cost of Jet-A as paid by commercial airlines in 2015 is $2/gallon. [1] In summary, it would cost about $80,000 in fuel for that flight, if you had a 90% full airliner of 600 people, the per-ticket fuel cost is only $133. Wiki confirms the approximate numbers where they list the 747-400 at 72mi/us gallon/seat (only showing 415 seats on the airplane). A 5,500-mile flight from LAX to Sweden would then take 31,000 gallons of fuel, which again at $2 would cost $62,000 or $150/seat. [1] - http://www.transtats.bts.gov/fuel.asp http://www.transtats.bts.gov/fuel.asp [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Long_haul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Long_...