kublikhan wrote:Should airlines be the canary? Airlines get better mpg than automobiles.Tanada wrote:If private airlines are the canary I think they are the investors are going to start abandoning the sinking stock when they figure Peak Oil out.A Prius With Wings vs. a Guzzler in the CloudsU.S. major airlines average about 64 mpg, according to calculations using Department of Transportation data for 2009. For each gallon of jet fuel, airlines could, on average, fly one seat 64 miles. That's better than your SUV or hybrid car, unless you pack lots of people into the car.
Boeing says its 777-200ER wide-body jet gets nearly 82 miles to the gallon with 301 seats, all full, on a 3,000-mile trip. Boeing says the champ in its current line-up is the 737-900 with 180 passengers flying 1,000 miles. It gets nearly 99 mpg. The plane with the best average mpg in Airbus's current line-up is the A320 family.
This in my opinion puts us firmly in the statistics do not lie but liars use statistics discussion. Sure in isolation you can say the new super duper airplane gets great fuel efficiency. However just like a city bus that efficiency is tempered by two things, how full is the device hauling the people? How close to the final destination does the device get the people?
If I get in my Honda Civic with my wife and two or three kids I can go directly from my garage to street parking near Mudhens stadium in Toledo. If I want to take th bus I first have to drive to the edge of the bus network, park, transfer to the bus and walk the last distance into the stadium. It certainly isn't worth the time investment to me or my family when I can just drive an extra 15 minutes to ge in easy walking distance of the stadium.
Say instead I want to go to a Tigers game in Detroit or a Redskins game in Cleveland. Each is about a 60-90 minute drive in my civic, depending on traffic. Again I can park in walking distance of the stadium. If I want to take mass transit my only option is drive to the bus network, park, ride the bus possibly with transfers and a lot of extra time, then reverse the process to go home. The only time I ever did anything remotly like that was years ago going to the Detroit Auto Show I found a parking place on the People Mover monorail. Unfortunately only the inner ring was ever built around the city core, the portions connecting to outer suburbs and other cities was never built. In theory I could go to Detroit or Cleveland by air from Toledo Express airport with a flight time of 30 minutes or so. In reality I would have to go on the one flight of the day to that destination, stay over night, and fly back on the reciprocal flight the next day. Even to do that I would have to drive from my home 30 miles to the airport that is on the other side of Toledo out in the country several miles.
So does the airplane get better milage? In a race from airport to airport, sure. But when you add in the travle out of the way to get to and from the airport on each end, both time and expense, flying is a time and efficiency loser on any journey under several hundred miles. Even going to a Bengals game in Cincinati would take an hour by air and four hours by car. But add in the travel to and from the airports, the wait to get through security, and the fact that on each end the airplane has to taxi, load and taxi and unload the actual time is more like three hours. Plus I have to rent a car or take a cab in Cincinnati to get from the airport to the game and back, and an overnight stay to catch the return flight. How can that possibly be more efficient than just driving my relatively fuel efficient car for four hours?
No, to fly any distance that a reasonable person can drive in 8 hours or less is the real inefficient solution, at least in energy terms and often in time as well.