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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

I have a close family member who flys airliners. He routinely laments having to burn up thousands of pounds of fuel on the ramp to adjust changes to the landing weight projections by dispatch and from over fueling. The amount of waste in a single error (and they are not that infrequent) is enough to heat my house for a year… and I live within 200 miles of the arctic circle. I mean, burning 1000 gallons of fancy diesel once in a while is a rounding error for jetliner operations, but still, it’s absurd that that is the best solution.

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It's unfortunate the fuel can't be siphoned back out and used. I wonder why that is; I suspect if it were possible, it'd be happening.

Also worth noting, tangentially, though - the reason planes are fueled as they are is because if you run out of fuel in a car, you're just stranded. In an airplane, you're quite possibly dead. If you only load the plane with exactly as much fuel as it needs to get to its destination, you run the risk of not having enough to safely divert.

On the other hand, planes also have maximum landing weights, so a plane which must divert or land in an emergency often has to dump fuel for a while first. That's more unusual and not something you can easily plan for, but it's part of the problem too.

I can't see the fuel being able to be reused for aviation once it's been outside the stewardship of the fuel company, but how about draining it out and selling it or even giving it away - if for nothing else for CO2 reasons

Aviation fuel is taxed specially and is sometimes dyed to make it difficult to do this. Jet fuel itself is basically just diesel/kerosene, though, so if any is left over it can just be used for the next flight.

I was thinking of this in terms of aerial refueling.

It's always better to take off with less than a full tank of fuel. Once you're airborne, the aircraft can top off its tank to complete its journey. Of course, it may even be more economical to top off at multiple legs as the journey proceeds. To your point, a "reverse" refueling would also be ideal in order to lower the weight of the aircraft.

In certain contexts, it's already being done. It'd likely need to be much safer in order for civilian aircraft to carry out aerial refueling though.

Aviation is notoriously resistant to change. For both good and bad reasons. Look at how long it's taken to get leaded fuel on the way out for light aircraft operations.

It seems like there should be a solution to this though, either battery-electric or fuel-cell auxiliary thrust for ground operations and taxiing, or utilising tractors more to do the full aircraft ground movement, not just pushing back from the gate. Unfortunately it's impossible to suggest such changes without getting a horde of aviation nerds thinking of reasons to tell you why something isn't possible, instead of imagining how it _could_ be possible.

So it's exciting to see companies like Heart Aerospace innovating in this area.

Back in the day I was questioning operational tankering in my organization,but to no avail.

Not in aviation anymore, but luckily that practice seems to be forgotten now?

It's making a resurgence now thanks to the various wars messing with pricing worldwide.

Oh ffs. Of course it is.

Virgin Atlantic trialled this at Heathrow in 2006[0]. It looks like it didn't gain traction because the airport would need to be resigned to support it, and the landing gear might have been damaged by so much towing.

[0] https://simpleflying.com/throwback-virgin-atlantics-fuel-sav...

At least in Europe, except for the largest airports, the start slots are well organized enough that the taxi+wait time is just enough to warm up the engines, eliminating the saving.

This is sad to hear! Early in my career I worked for a company making airport collaborative decision making (A-CDM) software. One of the most impactful projects to which I contributed was a model that calculated the exact right moment for a pilot to turn their engine on given likely pushback times etc. That saved quite a lot of fuel (and therefore cost and pollution) back in the day. It's a real shame if similar thinking isn't being applied to the problem you describe.

I just had this happen on a flight yesterday. Exactly as you describe, extra fuel put the plane over weight, so we sat there letting it burn for an hour.

And meanwhile here I am feeling guilty when I eat a cheeseburger.

I don't get why people sometimes talk as if it's just large corporations that contributed to emissions.

It all makes a difference. There's no doubt that individual consumption contributes a lot to global emissions. Like large houses that use a lot of material, cement etc and cost a lot to heat and cool.

And those large corporations exist to serve customers. It's not like we could simply get rid of them.

But we obviously need to also look at the ways that we can work together to save emissions where possible.

It's frustrating to bother at all then hear about someone blowing 3x your annual carbon on a whim. Oh well.

Yes, but the plane fits hundreds of passengers. Isn't that much obvious?

Not to disagree that flying is very CO2 intensive, but it's not like the airline is burning fuel for fun. The passengers paid them to do it

Carbon offsets for that wasted fuel would run $500. Pay that and I will be happy.

Stop it, you’re killing the planet!

If nothing else, it matters to the cow

At that point it's too late for the cow either way.

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