How much does it cost to FUEL an airliner?!

hi everybody better welcome to mentor and yet another video podcast as always I hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video we're gonna be talking about how to pay for fuel and how much it actually cost to fuel an airliner we're also going to talking about the fuel system on the 77 800 and what happens if something goes wrong [Music] this video is brought to you in cooperation with skill share now if you don't know what skill share it's is an online learning platform with thousands of high quality courses and pretty much any subject that you can imagine now if you use this link here below you'll get whopping two months of free premium Skillshare which means that you can access all of these courses you can check them out you can even access them off line if you have the app and I am sure that you will find something that you find fascinating so check it out [Music] like that so the way that I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna divide it into 2 potentially 3 different steps so we're gonna start we're talking about the cost of fuel why it's so important to keep that in check and how we actually pay for things and then we are going to talk about the fuel system on the 737-800 and what different faults can come with it so if we start with the cost of fuel now the cost of fuel is one of the single biggest cost that any airline out there has my airline that I work for spent about eleven billion dollars in fuel last year and this is why keeping a check on the costs I think both the price of the fuel and also how much fuel is being used is extremely important it is the difference between being profitable and non profitable in the airline world the way that this is done is a try to use as effective and efficient aircraft as possible so this is why the aircraft manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing keep pushing out more and more efficient aircraft because they know that this is what the airlines are craving it's also good for the environment but definitely good for the wallets of the airlines so how much does it actually cost them it's hard to get a little bit of a grasp on that isn't it well if we use the 77 800 on fly as an example it burns about 40 kilos of fuel per minute all right that's an average during climb it's about twice that during the Sun it's less than half of that but 40 kilos a minute is a good average figure now you might think that doesn't sound very efficient to me because 40 kilos of fuel that's about you know half a tank of fuel that's like one and a half or two weeks in the car but if you think about how far you actually get on that minutes when you're flying and how many passengers do you're carrying you've starting to realize why it actually is quite effective so forty kilos of fuel and our average flight that I do about two two hours a little bit so let's say just make it easy to calculate it's two hours that's about 120 minutes it is exactly hundred and twenty minutes at forty kilos minute that's 4.8 tons of fuel and that fuel cost about $60 cents so that brings it about two thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars of fuel costs for that two hour flight now we can carry 189 passengers but you know maybe we don't do that all the time so let's say that we have a range of about 150 to 189 passengers so when we're absolutely full to be carrying 189 passengers the fuel cost is about fifteen dollars per passenger for that two-hour flight it goes down to 150 passengers then it skills it to 20 dollars so that's somewhere where we are the total cost of fuel for the airline is about 40% of the total cost of eya of the whole flight so let's say that you end up with approximately thirty to forty dollars per passenger in total costs that means that any prices below that is going to be a loss to the airline and anything above that is going to theoretically be a gain because of course you have costs like maintenance cost like the actual cost of buying the aircraft paying for the personnel pilots cabin crew engineers all of that is included in this and any change in fuel price is going to have a huge difference on whether they're the airline is profitable so how do they actually pay them do they have to carry your own packages of cash or a credit card to pay for every time the fuel even though that does happen in parts of the world there are countries where you do have to have a cash reserve with you and that's not the case in most most airlines now what happens is that we the pilots order how much fuel that we need and then when the fueling is completed the fueler will come up with a fuel receipt check that the liters and the kilos of what we asked for and then we sign that and that goes into the few we'll provider that will then send a huge bill to the airline at probably the end of the month there are differences in fuel price between different airports and that can be due to for example some local tax issues or that the fuelling company is more expensive in their services and so that means that the airlines sometimes do tank ring that we carry more fuel than what we actually need in order to avoid uplifting fuel at a place where it's more expensive but that tends to equals out if you look over the network so what the airlines actually do is in most cases they try to call they try to do something called fuel hedging that is that they they talk to a fuel provider and let's say we call it British Petroleum or something and they decide that they are going to buy X amount of thousands of tons of fuel from the provider at a fixed price and that price tend to be just a little bit higher than the current market price now the good thing for the provider is that they have they know that they can sell this to this customer that they know pays the good thing for the airline is that they can do a accurate projection of what their fuel costs will be so they know that it's gonna cost like this much for this amount of time so they can adjust their ticket prices and stuff in order to make sure that they're profitable the risks they're running though is that the few the oil price will drop down in that case they're stuck paying the higher price for the full period of this fuel edge and this is why you'll see different strategies some airlines will have their entire fuel kind of use hedged some of them have a little bit and they might have a different time period and some of them just don't hedge they just follow the the fuel price and sometimes they would be very profitable because of that and sometimes they would have a loss because of that but these are different individual strategies in between the airlines okay good so the cost of fuel approximately you know average about $60 cents per kilo could be less could be more but that's pretty much where it is right maybe we should take an example up how much does it actually cost to do a flight bin between for example Los Angeles and Tokyo well I've looked into figures for this when scouring the internet to see if I could get some fuel figures for you and the figure I could find was about 17 to 19 thousand dollars for an average flight flying between Los Angeles and Tokyo a flight between New York and Los Angeles about 16 tons of fuel approximately four thousand four hundred dollars something like that so that gives you an idea about the individual prices for each flight right so let's start talking about the second step then the fuel system of the 737-800 well first of all we have three different fuel tanks so you have what we call the main tanks which are the tanks that are situated in the left and the right wing and then you have a center tank which is situated just behind the wheel world Bay on the 800 the main tanks they're called main for reason those are the main tanks we use to to fill up with fuel if we have to carry them less than seven point eight tons all of that fuel will be in the wings and if we have to carry more than seven point eight tons the remaining part will go into the center time so it's 3900 kilos in each wing now if you're interested in knowing why we have to put the fuel into the wings first I've done a separate video about that phenomenon it's really fascinating so I want you to use this link and go and check it out later on basically and if we use a center type the center tank carries about 13 tonnes of fuel you can potentially fill up as much as 21 tons of fuel into the 800 but that is basically never done we only carry as much fuel as we need for the flight that we need to do with dissipated reserves and diversion fuel the reason we don't carry more fuel than that is because it costs fuel to carry fuel right the weight of the fuel is going to make the aircraft burn more fuel so it's actually completely unnecessary costs the only time that I've flown with a completely filled up aircraft was when I did the delivery flight of a brand new seventy seven eight hundred from Seattle to Dublin that was a 10-hour flight and it was completely filled up and we could do that non-stop in the 800 but I knew what my task if you can do a 10-hour flight with the 800 why why don't we see more 800 s doing doing transatlantic flights well it's a good question but the answer to that is because of the weight of the fuel the maximum takeoff weight we have on the 800 is about 78 tops now if you think about it if you fill it up with 21 tons of fuel it means that we now only have 57 tons the zero fuel weight us in the empty aircraft with a little bit of extra stuff in it is about 43 44 tonnes so that doesn't leave much room for passengers and this is why if you're gonna fly like we did from Seattle to Dublin we only were three people on board and that's not very economical but this is also why when you look at for example the 737 max it is much more efficient which means that it needs less fuel to fly over the Atlantic which makes it viable it means that you can fill it up with more people and you can use it that way but back to the fuel system so three tanks of fuel we use the fuel that's in the center tank first so they're two different fuel pumps in each tank the center pumps the center tank fuel pumps have a higher output pressure so this means that when we're running the engines since they have a higher output pressure the fuel will go first from a santa tank it will empty out and then once it's empty and we've turned off the fuel pumps in the santa tank well then the engines will start feeding from the from the wing tanks as well so the fuel pumps will push the fuel through a fuel filter for each engine that fuel filter is there to to capture any any contaminants that might be in the fuel so it could be water or it could be something that has been transferred over from the fuel truck into the tank the fuel would flow through these these filters and if there are contaminants the fuel filters would start to fill up and if they fill up they won't let any more fuel through now this BB catastrophic if the fuel wouldn't reach the engines so there is a bypass doctor that can if the pressure becomes too high in front of the fuel filters that will open up and let feel true but if that happens it means that fuel is now flowing unfiltered through the bypass duct into the engine so whatever contaminants was in the fuel is now going to go directly into the onions and we will get a master caution warning in the cockpit most a caution fuel and it will say fuel filter bypass and we have a non-normal checklist for that it basically says that you know for whatever reason the fuel filter has been clogged up so you might start noticing erratic engine working and it might even lead to a potential engine failure if you get that on one engine it's bad enough you should probably start diverting but if you get it on two engines it means that the all of the fuel on board has now been contaminated and you might face a dual engine failure so this is a full-blown mayday it means that you have to divert to the closest available airport and you could lose both engines now if you're interested in seeing me fly an aircraft where two engines have flamed out failed LAN there's a leak up here up to a video that I did about that it's it's quite interesting to watch so so that's fuel filter bypass and other things that could happen is that we could get a fuel imbalance that's when you have more fuel in one tank than the other now neck of always wants to try to be fairly stabilized so if the difference in fuel goes above about 453 kilos then we will get a warning saying inbound on our fuel indicators that will prompt us to do an imbalance checklist in the cure rate and basically the first thing that we need to do is to show that we don't have a fuel leak because you could get a few leaks it could be a fuel leak in the engine or from the tank and the olden way that we that we find that out is that when we see the imbalance we start to calculate how much fuel we should have on board so we have our flight plan we know how few how much fuel we should be burning at each individual Waypoint we can go in and we can check ok how much room should we have how much fuel do we have and if there is a significantly less amount of fuel on board well that's an indication of a fuel leak another indication is to see how quickly the imbalance is starting to develop so you know if we see a change in balance of the fuel above a certain threshold value that's another indication and if we think that it is a fuel leak so we have much less fuel than we anticipated we will not start to try to balance the fuel up we will just start diverting will calculating how much fuel we have and obviously only use you know the fuel that we have available on the side that is not leaking it's gonna effectively cut the amount of fuel we have in half so it's going to lead to a diversion but at least we won't be starting to fuel from the you know good side to the bad side and potentially of just pumping fuel out to a hole in the wing and if the imbalance is for another reason so you know for whatever reason the the fuel has gotten into an imbalance it might be because of a slight lean on closed cross-feed valve for example well then we do what we call a cross feed procedure and that is once we've established that there is no fuel leak we open a cross feed valve which is a valve that connects both of the main tanks together we open it up and make sure that it goes from off to bright to dim that indicates that the valve has moved the way we want it and then we turn off the fuel pumps in the side that has low fuel so that means that now it's only going to be output pressure on the tank that has more fuel that is now going to push out the fuel into both engine so both engines will be fed from the higher tank which means that that will eventually start equally the site's out in the 7/7 800 we don't have any capability to pump fuel from one tank to the other the only way we have to balance fuel is by cross feeding so that's what we do and not a problem that could arrives is if we come in to low fuel situations so let's say that we have flown to our destination and we've diverted and something has happened and our diversion field which not doesn't allow us to land well then we can go into low fuel situation and that will show up on our fuel gauges in yellow as low and what we have to do down is we go through a checklist and it will basically tell us to well land as soon as possible but also avoid sudden pitch changes and the reason for that is because the fuel pumps - in each tank are situated in different places in the tank if you do a sudden pitch change and you have too little fuel you might run the both fuel pumps without fuel covering them and they will start to cavitate and it won't be able to provide any fuel so very sudden pitch changes that includes being careful during your potential go around for example but then just try to get the aircraft down on ground as soon as possible so yeah that's about it about the fuel system guys I hope that you've enjoyed that and if you have more questions as always go in and ask me in the mentor aviation app you have the links to the app down here and before we go I want to send a huge thank you to the sponsor of this episode which is Skillshare now Skillshare has literally thousands of high quality training courses pretty much anything that you can imagine but of course that i think that you would really enjoy is learn how to fly with Howard Miller this is a fully qualified instructor who will help you use your own flight simulator at home your PC flight simulator to prepare for your PPR license it's very very good to give you the fundamentals about how it works how to fly so if you are a flight similar and you want to learn from a professional check that out other courses which I use myself is for example how to build and maintain a quality YouTube channel so if you're interested in doing that there are courses for that as well as well 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absolutely fantastic day bye bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 262,431

Rating: 4.9160428 out of 5

Keywords: flight training, pilot life, operating costs, friendly skies film, airplane fuel, how to, nervous flyer tips, nervous flyers how to relax, nervous flyer video, nervous flyer on plane, Fear of flying, Aircraft fuel, boeing 737 max 8, boeing 737 max, boeing 737-800, Boeing 737 Fuel system, Aircraft fuel system, Cost of aircraft fuel, aircraft fuel systems, aircraft fueler job, mentour pilot 737 max, mentour pilot turbulence, mentour pilot simulator, mentour pilot 737

Id: dU8Ah1VC2Wg

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019