Gasoline burnt on regular airplane, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news93495699.html

http://www.physorg.com/news93495699.html

Does anyone know how much gasoline current airplanes use? It says this one "...burns about four liters (one gallon) of gas per passenger every 80 miles" I"m wondering if that"s good or bad compared to current planes?

I suspect its better, most new designs improve on older ones, if just slightly, and in aircraft, they are calculating this figure based on a FULL passenger load.

To put it in perspective though, at 80 seat miles per gallon that is the same efficiency as a 20 MPG car with 4 passengers.

And 20 MPG is fairly low for most 4 passenger cars and for highway driving (which would be what you would compare it to a plane), so this milage is certainly not thrilling.

By the way, that's per gallon of FUEL and jets don't burn gasoline, they burn a type of Kerosene and you do get a few more gallons of kerosene from a barrel of oil than you do Gasoline.

Arthur

This post has been edited by adoucette on Mar 19 2007, 10:59 PM

I think I heard a 747 at cruise use 8 gallons per mile.

Roughly.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/airports/acaps/7474sec3.pdf

Which works out to ~50 seat miles per gallon.

A four seater car that gets 25 MPG gets twice that seat mile per gallon.

Of course a four seater car is pretty useless for crossing the Pacific.

Arthur