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Comment by jagged-chisel | Hacker News Reader

How much will it cost in fuel (additional miles) and time (flyers’ lives) to reroute?

> The proposed detours typically result in a 1% shift (and again, this is only for a small percentage of flights). That means increasing fuel use and flight time by around 1%. So if your flight is three hours long, it’s only adding an extra two minutes. For a 10-hour flight, six minutes. This seems socially acceptable to me; most people would barely notice.

Airlines will certainly notice a 1% fuel cost increase however. But, they'll just add it to ticket prices.

It’s not a 1% increase in fuel costs. It’s 1% of 3% (for 80% mitigation) to 17% (for total mitigation). That’s a 0.03% to 0.17% increase in fuel costs.

They'll all need to do it at once though, or people will just pick the cheaper flight that doesn't go around the contrail-forming region, basically every time.

Of course it's a coordination problem. It probably needs to be a regulation before it will actually happen.

1% less fuel will not be 1% less ticket cost, but something much less.

the question is whether the contrail produces the amount of warming equivalent to extra fuel used, of which I'm doubtful

The entire initiative is based on the idea that it is more friendly to route around contrails. I work actively in this area on the routing side (flightscience.ai), and can assure you it's actually fairly cheap climate-wise to reroute a flight given enough warning. If you check out their map (follow TFA's links), you can see that contrails are formed in fairly localized areas.

Go to aviationweather.gov, and you can see huge boxes of alert areas that we already have to deal with. It's really just another day at the office.

The article addresses this in detail.

It covers the impact of fuel quite thoroughly but it brushes over the time element which I think is actually a bigger factor in why they don't really do it. Passing on the fuel cost to the customer they could probably get away with but given how tightly packed the flight schedules are (particularly short haul) the cumulative extra time across even a day could be enough that they have to drop a flight from the schedule.

When you consider that RyanAir don't have seat back pockets specifically because of the extra cleaning time to clear them between flights, you can see why the extra 2 minutes flight time might matter.

adding a little extra time doesn't necessarily break the schedule. often when i've flown we've arrived early due to favorable winds.

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