Plane oil

Less fuel consumed on a plane than on a car? How weird.

The last time I was on a plane, the pilot announced that we had travelled 800 km, used up 3500 litres of kerosene.

If you do the maths, he said, considering the number of people on this plane, it amounts to 2.5 litres per person per 100 km.

And what did I do before writing this article? I checked and yes, he was not lying.

This means that, somehow, we consumed less oil on this plane than I do with my car on the motorway. Something evades me: why on earth don’t air companies communicate more on this if it’s so drastically economical, oil-wise?

Or maybe they don’t want to be reminded of the sound and gas pollution, or something. Really, I’m at a loss to understand this.


  • Éric (8 November 2017)

    They do. I had the same speech most of the time I traveled by plane for holidays.

    First response : Usual long distance car use something like 7.5 liters by 100 km for long roads. This means if you are 3 people, it’s not worse than a plane. If you are the usual family of 4 with 2 kids, the plane is worse. Did they also told that?

    But hey, the car is probably already the worse transportation system if you want to spare energy. They are comparing with the worst transportation system ever and still they are winning only in specific conditions (extremly long distance, no more than 3 people in the car). Is this really a success?

    But still, this is not the good question to answer.

    The real question, if you are looking for energy or ecology: Why the **** are we using energy and oil to go to the other side of the world, is this really reasonable? Should we continue?

    That’s the difficulty of the argumentation. True or not, it make us think we are having a green travel, which cannot be true.

    The question is not easy to listen and yes we, rich people, also want to have holidays (me too) but at least let’s not make company fool us in believing traveling by plane is somewhat "green". It’s not. It’s not always green when compared to cars. It’s not green at all when thinking about the whole planet and the travel itself.

    Reply to Éric

  • arkhi (9 November 2017)

    I couldn’t find proper information on the topic, so I wonder how much energy it costs to refine kerosene, and how much energy it costs to refine diesel or common gas.

    Reply to arkhi

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