Terry Jones

Continuing from the last post, let’s suppose fuel costs are constant across all airlines.

On my 6-hour Air Comet flight, I will be paying about $8/hr for fuel and $10/hr for everything else (not bad, seeing as I get to watch a couple of movies and eat a meal).

Going to Cheaptickets I see the next cheapest option is Air Lingus (not a direct route), who will charge me $450. So you’d be tempted to conclude that Air Lingus is 4 times more expensive than Air Comet. But… the price of the fuel is constant. That means I’m paying $400 for the trip in non-fuel costs, which would be roughly $65/hr if the flights were the same length (they’re not). So Air Lingus is actually more like 6.5 times as expensive as Air Comet. The cheapest US carrier (Delta in this case) will charge me $1,127 which would be more like $180/hr or 18 times as expensive as Air Comet (were the trips the same length, which they’re not).

All very non-scientific.

I’m about to book a cheap flight from JFK to Madrid with Air Comet. There are some alarming and amusing comments about the airline online. See this page for example – search for hot red smocks and slit skirts. I flew that route with them about a month ago and everything went smoothly.

And the low, low, price? Just 83 euros one way!

According to this site a 12-hour flight needs 110 tons of fuel. Mine’s a 6:15 flight, so call it 55 tons of fuel. A ton is 2000 pounds according to google, so 110,000 pounds of fuel are needed. Jet engine fuel is like kerosene and weighs about 6 pounds per gallon. So that’s 110,000 / 6 = 18,333 gallons of fuel for the trip. Fedex charges a fuel surcharge when the price of jet fuel rises above $0.98, so let’s assume Air Comet is paying $0.80 per gallon.

Thus the price of fuel alone for the trip is roughly 18,333 x $0.80 = $14,666.

The plane is an Airbus 313, which has a capacity of 295. If we assume the flight is full, Air Comet needs to charge each passenger just under $50 for fuel alone. 83 euros is about $110. So Air Comet can cover the cost of fuel. Good.

Continuing, that leaves $60 of my ticket price times 295 passengers, or roughly $17K to pay for everything else.

This all assumes that everyone is paying the same low price, which of course they are not.

While googling for the above numbers, I found an article about the first model plane that crossed the Atlantic. It weighed 11 pounds (5 kilos) and got about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, i.e., less than $1 of fuel for the whole trip.