Re: Avro Vulcan bomber flies again!

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:21:49 +0000 (UTC), ranck@xxxxxx <ranck@xxxxxx> wrote:
Ad absurdum per aspera <jtchew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

How much does it cost to fly?

A friend found this amid the Daily Mail's exhaustive coverage of
celebrities behaving shabbily en d?shabill? and sent it around:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488349&in_page_id=1770
It says they were guessing that the 20-minute-or-so flight would burn
fuel costing a thousand pounds., or roughly $2k US these days. I

You know, when I read that I wondered if someone told the reporter
that it would burn a thousand pounds of fuel, and said reporter
wrote it down without determining if they were talking about weight
or monetary value. I don't know if that is even a possible point
of confusion, but I wondered.

A quick Google search says that the JT3D jet engine (used
by DC-8 and 707 airliners) consumes about 9500 pounds/hr of fuel
at takeoff thrust. I'd guess the fuel consumption of the
Vulcan's engines would be about the same order of magnitude.

With four engines, that's almost 40,000 pounds per hour of
fuel at takeoff thrust. Fuel consumption at lower throttle
settings would be much less, but it's pretty hard to imagine
a large 1950s vintage multiengine jet aircraft could take off
and fly for 20 minutes on only 1,000 pounds of fuel.

It looks like Jet-A costs somewhere between $3 and $4 a gallon
in the US right now. A British pound is just about $2.

Blindly assuming British prices for Jet-A are about the same
as in the US, I'll say it's about 1.70 GBP/gallon.

At that price, 1,000 British pounds would buy about 590 gallons
of Jet-A, which at 6.8 lb/gal would weigh about 4,000 pounds.

4,000 pounds of fuel to fly a Vulcan for 20 minutes seems more
likely than 1,000, so I think the $2K figure isn't unreasonable.


ljd
.

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