You have neglected the most important thing that must be taken into consideration, and that is the departure time of my commuting flight home relative to my planned arrival time. I have not missed one yet. I would love to see the data on flight times at the end of a pairing. I've got dollars saying they're the best flight times on record.

Amen....

Green Dot anyone?:D

This is a companion/complementary article about the increasing use of propeller planes because of fuel costs. I don't know about anybody else, but I've always been grateful for the propeller in my little C-172. ;)

Ha!! Me too!! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I'll second that statement, it's amazing that we can shot a visual approach at 250 kts till 5-7 miles from the airport on go home leg. Gotta love the props

I'm curious how much savings is made by slowing down versus the variable cost (and some fixed) of higher time on the airframe which speeds up it's useful life and frequency of maint. checks and the cost of the increased payroll by flying longer block times.


In the International spectrum, this could be significant if you have a flight that is blocked for 7 hr 59 mins which can be flown by a two-man crew. By slowing down whether specifically from company guidance or by personal choice, the segment that is just under 8 hrs is now over 8 hrs more than 50% of the time in a 90 day snapshot thus requiring the company to change the block time to reveal it is an over-8 hr flight requiring the use of a third pilot (Relief Officer).

Next, hub and spoke schedules are a delicate balancing act. When block times need to be lengthened, this upsets the apple cart and could possibly (not definately, in the case of rolling hub scheduling) create a situation where planes now spend more time on the ground waiting for other planes to arrive with their connecting passengers.

Finally, and maybe this is an intangible cost for running over block time, but what is the cost of lost revenue from a business person that is 15-20 mins late for a meeting, misses their connection, etc. We all know many people schedule air travel in their plans with the same margin for error as a trapeze artist.i.e arrive at ORD at 1230pm, meeting downtown at 130pm.


I honestly don't know which is the better solution. Just curious if others might have some thoughts...thanks

FF

The reality is that the slower cost index they've been throwing at us lately does not add a whole ton on to the duration of the flight. Last night on my redeye from SFO to JFK, we messed around with a bunch of different numbers and the slower ones added just a few minutes onto the ETE, and that was going all the way across the country. We were already using pretty slow numbers to begin with so it's not a massive change. It's not going to cause us to show up 20 minutes late or anything.

However, when you add up very small fuel savings times all the flights we do in a year, and it does add up over time. Just like the APU campaign going on. Few gallons here, few gallons there but multiply that by a large scale operation over time and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

In the long term run it sounds like a good deal. Slow down the TAS to get better fuel economy,but even that can't REALLY dent the fuel problem. With all this technology we have today you would think that by this day and age they would of realized the fuel problem and started creating alternative fuel options. Maybe they'll just wait till fuel becomes 6$ a gallon to start to consider other options. Who knows :confused:

Delta puts the gas in Comair's tanks and Delta keeps the savings. Why would Delta insist that Comair bebop along at .62 if it's messing up mainline's operations? Comair doesn't always know who's 80 miles in trail and gaining fast.

Boomer

Problem with flying slower
 

It doesn't work very well unless everyone else slows up too. DAL tried slowing up the MD-88s once, and we invariably wound up at the tail end of a large number of arrivals. After a long final approach, we had burned even more fuel than usual. Of course, somebody else probably saved fuel by getting in ahead of us, but I don't think that was the plan. :rolleyes: