“India is obsessed with mileage” a tagline from an advertisement campaign of Maruti Suzuki, where they would show Indians asking question everywhere about the mileage. “Kitne Deti Hai?” meaning “How much mileage does it gives?”. Well, Indians are indeed obsessed with mileage and why shouldn’t we?. We are not that rich a nation who has an abundance of oil wells to make petroleum easily affordable.
However, have we ever thought about how much mileage does an aeroplane gives in 1 litre of fuel. Well to your surprise, the figures are not that high.
Many of us have travelled in a plane for once at least, but we might never have questioned how much fuel does your flight required that day to take you to your business trip or a prolonged deferred vacation. Don’t worry, we’ve got answers for you.
Talking about an aircraft, it is studied that an average aircraft consumes 4 litres of aviation turbine fuel (ATF) per second. That’s right, your weekly fuel requirement gets whooshed into the large turbines in a single second. Talking about the famous Boeing 747 model, it consumes more than 240 litres of ATF in less than a minute. As per the data available on Boeing’s official website, a Boeing 747 aircraft consumes around 36,000 gallons of fuel during its 10-hour journey which is approximately equal to 1,25,000 litres. If we calculate, it takes up 12 litres of fuel for running every kilometre. Thus, if you ask, a Boeing 747 gives a mileage of 0.08 Kms or 84 Metres per litre.
However, you will feel a sigh of relief when you will know that ATF costs around Rs 58,000 per kilolitre or Rs 58 per litre. A litre of petrol costs around Rs 74 and diesel is priced at Rs 65 per litre.
Well, still that’s an expensive ride right there knowing how easily litres of petrol gets burnt to smoke every second.
