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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

You are pretty much showing your ignorance of F1 racing. Every year, the electric component of their engines makes up a greater proportion of the power train than the combustion engine. Kinetic energy recovery systems have improved in leaps and bounds due in a large part to the R&D done on the F1 racetrack.

To put it in perspective - Even in the heady days of F1 racing in the 80's. All the fuel used by every car in every team on every racetrack each year (including all practices, qualifying and races) still used less fuel than a single 747 on a transatlantic flight.

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wow - do you have any sources for your example with the 747 on the transatlantic flight. I dont' think you're wrong, I just would like to check the facts. I know that transatlantic flights are VERY bad for the environment and for the carbon foot print someone leaves behind.

Well the 747 is pretty old-tech by today's airliner standards ( mockingly called a gas-guzzler ) but a 747-400 burns roughly 9,600 to 11,500kg of fuel per hour in the cruise per public-domain figures.

If we round the latter to 12,000 per hour and convert to litres at a density of 1.23 for kerosene, that's 43 litres per passenger for a British Airways -400 with 345 seats, which is fairly low density due to a large number of suites and business seats:

https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/British_Airways/British_Ai...

That 43 litres propels that passenger 510 nautical miles in one hour, 945km. 22km per litre.

Now, an Air Canada 777-300ER which is a generation on from the 747-400 burns about 8,500kg per hour with 458 passengers... And an A350-1000 should beat that by about 15% when it enters service.

The efficiency of even semi-modern airliners is remarkable.

To extrapolate the excellent stats above from @dingaling - Lets compare the 777-300ER with a modern F1 car.

All F1 cars (under 2017 regulations) start a 45-55 lap (2 hour) race with 100Kg of fuel. No more can be added. Given that the cars will probably do another 50 odd laps during the 3 practice sessions and qualifying sprints, then each car will use about 200Kg of fuel per race meet. Lets round it up to 250Kg to allow for idling/testing in the garage, in/out sequences into the pit lane etc.

There were 20 cars competing in the 2017 season (10 teams with 2 cars each), across 20 different tracks:

250 x 20 x 20 = 100000Kg of fuel used over the 2017 season.

The time to fly from London to New York is around 8 hours, so the 777 would burn:

8 x 8500 = 68000Kg

So, a modern airliner would save a little more fuel on a transatlantic one way flight, but we are still around 2/3rds of the entire F1 season's worth of fuel - and that is just ONE plane out of the hundreds that make that flight every single day. (and don't forget that I added about another 25% of fuel load onto the F1 figures to allow for errors, but I don't think many cars will do more than 100 laps on a race weekend - so ACTUAL usage may be 25% LESS than I extrapolated, making them almost equivalent figures for both plane and F1 season).

Thank you for your calculations. Great stuff!

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