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American Airlines flight crosses the Atlantic with five passengers aboard
Environmental activists are outraged by a recent American Airlines flight from Chicago to London which only carried five passengers. The aircraft, a massive Boeing 777, used approximately 22,000 gallons of fuel, or 4,400 gallons per passenger. The five people on board were all upgraded to business class and waited on by two flight attendants, in what was surely the most comfortable flight of their lives.
Despite the criticism from environmental groups, American Airlines is defending its decision to go ahead with the nearly empty flight. According to a spokesperson, hundreds of people were waiting in London for the flight to land so that they could leave for the US.
"With such a small passenger load we did consider whether we could cancel the flight and re-accommodate the five remaining passengers on other flights," said the spokesperson. "However, this would have left a plane load of west-bound passengers stranded in London Heathrow who were due to fly to the U.S. on the same aircraft."
The airline did note that, despite the scarcity of passengers, the plane did carry a full load of cargo. No word on whether it, too, was moved to first class.
Filed under: Activism, United States, Airlines, Transportation, Ecotourism, Consumer Activism
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David Troyer Mar 6th 2008 6:43PM
Hmm. I was told once by a senior account exec of a major of a leading logistics services company that they have to fly cargo planes to china virtually empty all the time. kind of a similar problem to all the empty containers from china sitting in US ports.
Mikael Mar 6th 2008 6:51PM
Before people start to moan about empty flights they should learn a bit more about how airlines work. An aircraft carries two types of payload: passengers and cargo. Depending on the passenger loading the remaining payload capacity is being used for cargo, which essentially allows airlines to turn passenger aircraft into cargo aircraft. Put simply: thanks to "payload-range" charts (and nowadays loading software) operators can easily replace passengers with cargo so they don't have to fly aircraft empty.
Considering the 777 has a maximum payload capacity of 55 tons at least 54 tons would have been available for cargo. Due to space issues not all of it would have been used but that would still mean about 30 tons of cargo...
Since 30 tons of cargo + passengers is not near the full load the aircraft wouldn't fly with maximum fuel (no point carrying 50 tons of fuel you're not going to use)so in the end the fuel consumption works out to be a lot less per kilogram payload than the environmentalists try to make it sound like...