Category: ✈️ Air Travel

People often cite the deterioration of on-board offerings. Smaller seats, less pitch, more cramped, no free food. The list goes on.

Same with airports. Security, expensive restaurants, lack of outside space.

And, yes, people complaining about these things would be correct. Myself included.

Though one thing that’s often overlooked is not the airport terminals themselves, but the car parks that serve them.

I’m not talking about long-stay offerings, including the increasingly popular off-airport car parks.

I’m talking about the short stay car parks. The car parks family and friends picking up their loved ones must use as more airports remove their pickup points.

Why? The cost. Me and my family easily spent over £300 last year, and that’s during a year when I didn’t travel as much as usual.

I’ve decided to name and shame the UK airports minting their own money from their short car parks.

Methodology

Almost all UK airports publish their own parking charges publicly online. For this exercise I used their short stay offerings — the car park someone would typically use to wait for an arriving passenger.

I selected 9 of the UK’s largest airports, including the 5 major London airports; Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and City.

It is clear airports are targeting pick-ups with short stays. Just look at the range of pricing models (note, not all airports offer these pricing tiers):

• 0-10 minutes
• 10-20 minutes
• Up to 30 minutes
• 30 to 45 minutes
• Up to 60 minutes
• Up to 2 hours
• Up to 3 hours
• Up to 4 hours

Results

Cheapest UK airport short stay parking option 0-10 mins

Download chart.

Edinburgh, you win. The only airport to offer a free parking. Albeit for 10 minutes.

I want to hear from anyone who has parked up, collected a passenger, paid for their ticket and left the car park in 10 minutes. I have a lot to learn.

Cheapest UK airport short stay parking option 0-30 mins

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30 minutes is more realistic for a pickup.

The budget airports fare worst here. Luton charges £9 for 30 mins and Stansted £8. Some low-cost flights can be purchased for less than this!

Cheapest UK airport short stay parking option 1 hour

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Stying over 30 minutes will cost you an extra £15.50 to park at London City Airport. Though the £23 cost does buy you up to 4 hours of parking.

You can see there is a large spread of parking charges when we look at one hour stays. Luton and Stansted again come out as second and third most expensive for one hours stay at £16 and £14 respectively.

Cheapest UK airport short stay parking option 3 hours

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Let’s assume your flight gets delayed, and the person waiting for you has to hang around the terminal waiting. Thanks to all the taxi drivers that have done this for me.

Luton and Stansted cash in. 3 hours of parking will cost £27 at both these airports.

In comparison, the major airports are significantly cheaper. Surprisingly the two major London airports Heathrow (£14.90) and Gatwick (£15) are both almost half the price of their smaller counterparts. They are also cheaper than Manchester (£18) and Birmingham (£16.50). Who said things were more expensive in the south?

Car Park Revenue

Heathrow currently has capacity for 51,500 cars in their car parks.

Let’s assume an underestimate; each one of those spaces brings in an hour of parking each day (£7.50).

If this was accurate, Heathrow would earn £386,250 a day or £140,981,250 a year in car park revenue!

Improvements

I’d like to see how these parking costs compare with other European and American airports.

tl;dr

3 hours of parking will cost £27 at both London Luton and London Stansted airports.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

Recently I disembarked a long flight to find my luggage already waiting on the carousel for me. In fact, it was as if the bags delivery had been perfectly timed as it allowed me to stroll up to the carousel and collect it.

This was as an odd experience. Why? Because I’m usually waiting until the end to collect my bag.

Many people theorise as to the order bags are delivered. It’s clear priority baggage will be first. But then what? The bags that went on the plane last, and thus offloaded first? Or the other way around?

In many cases I only have myself to blame as I often travel with my bike, which usually comes out last as oversized baggage.

Waiting gives me time to people watch in the baggage haul. Fortunately, at the time of writing, an airline has never lost my bag, but I’ve seen plenty of others told their bag has gone missing.

When will my luck run out?

Methodology

For the last 5 years Sita, an airline consultancy, have produced analysis titled, The Baggage Report, that reports on airline baggage trends.

View all the reports here.

Using these 5 reports I compiled the key stats regarding mishandled bags for analysis. Mishandled bags includes those lost or stolen, those that have been damaged or had items stolen, or those that have been delayed on arrival.

Data exists for years 2003, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 and covers major global airlines.

Results

Reasons for mishandled baggage (2018)

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77% of mishandled bags are delayed, 18% damaged or pilfered, with 5% completely lost or stolen.

Total passengers vs. mishandled bags

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Passenger numbers continue to increase year-on-year. In 2018 4.36 billion passengers were carried, compared to 1.89 billion in 2003.

Though airlines and airports are handling the increase well. There is an inverse correlation between passenger and mishandled bags; as passengers have increased, mishandled bags have generally decreased.

2018 saw a slight increase in mishandled bags (5.69 per 1000 pax), up from 2017 (5.57 per 1000 pax). Though this is a massive improvement on 2003 (13.2 per 1000 pax) and 2007 (18.8 per 1000 pax!), despite the increased passenger traffic in the last few years.

Total mishandled bags each year

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Almost 25 million bags were mishandled in 2018. We know of this 25 million, 5% were lost or stolen — that’s 1.25 million bags that passengers will never see again.

Assuming each bag has $500 worth of items in, which I would argue is an underestimate including the bag, that’s $625 million worth of lost baggage insurance companies might have to cover in the worst case.

Expanding this further, if each bag and its contents averages $1000 in value (what many basic travel insurance policies will cover) that adds up to $1.25 billion worth of lost and stolen baggage in 2018 globally!

77% or 19.25 million bags were delayed in 2018 meaning the airlines then have to deliver them back to passengers. Assuming it costs $10 to deliver each bag back to a traveller on average (this is a complete guess), that’s another $192.5 million airlines have to budget for (in their razor thin margins).

Chances you’ll lose a bag

Download chart.

Overall, you had a 0.57% chance of your bag being mishandled in 2018 — that’s 1 bag mishandled for every 175 passengers. Following current trends, this risk is likely to be slightly reduced in 2019.

You had a very low chance of your bag being completely lost or stolen (0.03% or 1 in 3333 passengers). It’s much more likely your bag was delayed (0.44% or 1 in 227 passengers).

tl;dr

You had a 0.57% chance of your bag being mishandled in 2018 — that’s 1 bag mishandled for every 175 passengers.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

Some adore them. Others turn their nose up.

Meals, or should I say, meals served in economy on board a flight often receive bad press. Some of those served in first, rival some of the best restaurants I’ve visited.

Personally I like the fairly new trend of buying meals in the terminal and taking them on-board. Many airlines are starting to charge passengers for food on long-haul routes anyway.

My reason being is that I get more choice, and can often select something slightly healthier if I want to.

Which got me thinking? How nutritious are meals on-board a flight?

Methodology

In 2018 Diet Detective wrote to various US airlines offering transcontinental routes to provide nutritional information on inflight meals and snacks.

I used a mean average of these numbers to come up with the analysis used in this post.

Results

Meal options

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The average meal onboard these airlines has 492 calories. For 2 meals on a long-haul flight, that’s just under 1000 calories. Well below the 2000 calories recommended for an “average” person.

Air Canada meals offer the lowest calorie content at 377 per meal, compared to Delta where onboard meals average 559 calories.

Snack options

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Snacks have a much larger variance. JetBlue snacks average 142 calories. On Hawaiian, snacks average 460 calories — more than the average meal on Air Canada flights.

Yearly change

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Looking at an average across all menu choices, the average number of calories was 360 in 2012; in 2013 it was 388; in 2014 it was 397; in 2015 it was 400; in 2016 it was 392, in 2017 it was 405 calories, a 13 calorie increase over 2016.

In all but one year, 2016, calorie content for airline food has slowly increased.

Improvements

The Diet Detective report did not cover all US airlines, nor did it cover any international airlines. It would be interesting to compare US versus international airlines for meal offerings given some international airlines offer a wide variety of meal choices to travellers (namely those in the Middle East).

tl;dr

The average airline menu item has increased in calorie content from 360 in 2012 to 405 in 2018 — an increase of 45 calories.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

The meals have been eaten and washed down with a glass of wine.

Twenty minutes later, everyone needs the toilet. Cue, a long queue to use the aircraft toilets.

In the age of airline cost-cutting, replacing a toilet with a seat is far more attractive on the balance sheet.

So how many toilets are ‘enough’?

Methodology

Most people can manage without using the toilet on a short flight of an hour or so. In fact, many people can manage on a flight of 2 or 3 hours.

For this post I looked at four planes that operate long haul routes, where most passengers will use the toilets at least once during the journey:

The rules

There are no US laws specifying minimum numbers of toilets on board planes.

There is also little guidance about recommended ratios of toilets to people elsewhere in the world.

To add some context, UK Health and Safety laws require a ratio of one toilet to start plus one more for each 25 people or part thereof. So in a workplace with 8 people, there would be a requirement for two toilets. In a workplace with 28 people, there should be three toilets, and so on.

The reality

All seats

View full table

The Boeing 747-8 has one toilet for every 28 passengers, compared to just one toilet shared between 30 on the Airbus A380 and Boeing 777-200LR. The newer planes offer the best ratio of passengers to toilets.

These numbers are considering total toilets across all seat classes. The picture improves in first class where some passengers enjoy 1 seat between 4 people (Boeing 747-8 and 777-200LR). Which of course impacts the numbers for economy passengers. The worst toilet to seat ratio for economy passengers is found on the Boeing 747-8, with one toilet for every 46 passengers.

Toilet efficiency

Let’s assume on an 8 hour flight a passenger visits the toilet twice on each journey, with an average time in the toilet of 4 minutes (8 minutes total).

For this calculation I’m going to only consider economy seats, because, lets be honest, we already know first and business class travellers have it good!

View full table

Overall the toilets on these aircraft are occupied between 63% – 72% of the flight, assuming they are open for use across the whole 8 hours. This equates to each toilet being occupied for around 5.5 hours in total.

That said, it’s not a perfect world. Most people tend to use the bathrooms on these types of flights about an hour after the first meal, and again in the final hour of the flight as it approaches its destination. Let’s assume that’s a 2 hour window.

Again, assuming passenger spend an average of 8 minutes in the toilet the numbers look a lot worse. The toilet utilisation is between 252% – 288%, meaning it is likely there will be someone in the toilet when you come to use it.

tl;dr

The worst toilet to seat ratio for economy passengers is found on the Boeing 747-8, with one toilet for every 46 passengers. At peak times, it’s very likely you’ll have at least two people queuing ahead of you to use the toilet.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

Have you seen one of the beautiful British Airways liveries to celebrate the airlines 100 years of flying?

Seeing the BOAC 747 up close a few weeks ago, I started wondering how much paint is required to cover a huge 747.

Painting a small room in a house can cost a small fortune depending on the choice of paint.

I decided to take a look at how much it costs to give a Boeing 747 a fresh coat of paint.

Analysis

Painting an aircraft

Painting of an aircraft is a very detailed exercise due to the following factors:

• The surface of an aircraft is subject to serious UV radiation.
• The surface itself is Aluminium, which does not provide the mechanical key the paint needs to hold on to the surface.
• The temperatures the aircraft could face could be in extremes and the paint applied should be able to take mechanical and thermal shock.
• Finally the choice of colours are limited and usually gaudy finishes are not applied lest the aesthetic appearance of the aircraft is lost.

There are various layers required when painting the fuselage of an aircraft.

A mild chromate converter is first applied on the surface so that the subsequent coats of paint will adhere to the Aluminium. A primer layer is then applied followed by a number of finish coats which are usually a Poly Urethane based paint.

Amount of paint required

According to Boeing, a paint job weighs 555 lbs on a 747 (and that’s after it dries).

This answer about aircraft paint would suggest the 40% of moisture is lost as aircraft paint drys. So dry a 747 would require 925 lbs of wet paint.

According to the same answer, if paint is applied to the aircraft using an HVLP spray gun, you can guesstimate that your transfer efficiency will be about 50%. Bringing the total paint required for a 747 to 1850 lbs.

A gallon of paint weighs 11.5 lbs, meaning 160.87 gallons of paint will be required to paint a 747.

Cost of paint

A gallon of Sherwin Williams Poly Urethane based paint costs the public $187.43 / gallon on Sky Geek.

That’s a total of $30,151.78 worth of paint for a 747.

It is a fair assumption that bulk orders will receive a significant price discount. Even at 50% that is a total cost of $15,075.89 just for paint.

Cost of time

A news article quoted it took Emirates Airlines 6550 hours to repaint 21 aircraft, an average of 312 hours each.

They run a round-the-clock operation, with 26-30 people working at any given time, so that translates into roughly 8500-9000 man hours to complete each plane. If the average entry level salary there is similar to the US at $18/hr, that’s upwards of $175,000 just in labor.

Total cost

Ignoring facility costs for electricity and cooling, it’s safe to say a paint job for a large aircraft could easily exceed $200,000 USD for materials and labour!

It is a regulatory requirement that an aircraft undergoes a thorough inspection – a “D Check”, approximately every 6-10 years. As part of this D-check, the paint is stripped off the aircraft to allow the hull to be thoroughly inspected.

As such, most airlines will wait until the aircraft is due for a D check before repainting.

Repainting the entire fleet

According to One Mile At A Time;

The world’s largest operator of the Boeing 747 is British Airways, as they have 36 Boeing 747-400s in their fleet.

Many of these are soon to be retired.

That means, every 8 years BA spend an estimated $1,085,464.08 ($30,151.78*36) on paint alone to perform a D-Check on these 747s.

Now imagine running a fleet of 109 A380s (Emirates)… I’m getting into the paint business.

tl;dr

A Boeing 747 costs $200,000 USD in material and labour costs to repaint.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

Did you see the article about United removing olives from their inflight meals leading to a cost saving of $40,000 per year?

It’s quite astounding isn’t it?

Now imagine all the other things carried by passengers in the cabin. The weight of all their clothes. Phones, laptops, and tablets. The bottles of water, or liquid they’ve consumed in the airport bar before the flight. Olives seem even more insignificant now.

With airlines continually introducing restrictions, and in-turn “added-extras”, I decided to take a look at the cost of flying the smaller items we, currently, pay no attention to bringing onboard.

Methodology

In 2017 I wrote a post about airlines undercharging for fuel. Sadly that post did not factor in load-factor (how full the plane was). Secondly, the prices for fuel in that post are now out of date. Updated fuel costs from IATA show an average $1.87 per gallon versus $1.45 at the time of writing in 2017.

Five Thirty Eight writers Luke Jensen and Brian Yutko created a more detailed model for weight to fuel cost in June 2014.

They calculated each marginal pound added in weight from carry on items cost an additional $0.01 USD per / lb for short-haul routes (500 miles) and $0.073 USD per / lb for cross-country flights (2,500 miles).

Adjusting for fuel cost (in June 2014 jet fuel cost $2.88 USD / gal) vs $1.87 (-35%) today (Feb 2019) this equates to an additional $0.006 USD per / lb for short-haul routes (500 miles) and $0.047 USD per / lb for cross-country flights (2,500 miles).

Converted to kilograms (because I don’t understand imperial) equals an additional $0.003 USD per / kg for short-haul routes (500 miles) and $0.02 USD per / kg for cross-country flights (2,500 miles).

These calculations assume a load factor of 85% (how full the plane was), equal to 122 passengers, on a Boeing 737-700, a commonly used plane (especially by Southwest airlines) on short-haul routes of 500 miles (equivalent to San Francisco to San Diego) and cross-country routes of 2,500 miles (East to West Coast USA)

I simply Googled weights of common items that might be taken onboard.

Results

Fuel cost of carry on short haul routes

Download chart.

Assuming you carry all these items onboard a 500 mile flight, you’ll cost the airline $0.09 more in fuel. Not much when compared to the ticket cost, but remember this calculation does not consider the weight the airline has already accounted for (your weight, bags, etc.).

If everyone does the same, all 122 passengers, that’s an additional $10.94 per flight, or $21.89 if you count the return leg too. If the flight operates everyday for a year that’s an addition $24,000 in fuel costs for the airline!

Fuel cost of carry on cross country routes

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On a longer flight of 2,500, or across the USA, these items will cost the airline $0.65 additional in fuel. Carrying on 1 litre of water (in a bottle or your body) will cost the airline $0.02 per passenger, or $2.63 for a flight of 122 people.

All items, again assuming the route operates once per day return, adds up to an additional fuel cost of $175,000.

If airlines asked passengers to travel naked on this hypothetical cross-country route, they could save $11,500 in fuel costs each year. You can see why even the cost of a single olive adds up quickly.

Back of napkin maths

Often airlines might run upwards many variations of trans-America routes. Assuming 100 variations of routes, running return once per day (probably an underestimate), that’s an additional $17.5 million in fuel costs for the additional weight per year using my numbers!

Thinking globally (100,000 flights per day), this number could easily cross many billions in savings per year (and a whole lot of emissions!).

Improvements

These are very rough calculations for a single type of plane over fixed distances. It would be great to see an analysis like this done on a real per-route basis.

tl;dr

On a cross country USA route of 2,500 miles, an airline needs to pay $0.02 in additional fuel costs for you to carry on 1 litre of water. A bladder can hold around 0.5 litres, or $0.01 worth of fuel on the same flight.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.

(But don’t use jet-fuel in your car).

Fuel is one of the biggest operating expenditures for airlines — and you’re probably being undercharged for it (at least in 2017).

We know that the airline industry is a heavy polluter. The fact an A380’s fuel tank has a capacity of 320,000 litres (84,500 US Gal) hints at just how much fuel is required to fly across the world.

Now consider the volume of commercial flights each day. Some estimates suggest this number exceeds 100,000 per day. That’s a lot of jet fuel.

I decided to delve into how much fuel airlines are using (and what it costs them).

Methodology

The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes data on fuel consumption and fuel cost reported by US based airlines for both domestic and international operation.

I selected the airlines classed as major (>$20 million revenue / year) that were operational for the whole of 2017 (the last year with full data reported at the time of writing).

Other statistics in this post were pulled from Wikipedia. Citations here.

Results

Fuel consumption of major US airlines 2017

Download chart.

In total the 17 major US airlines consumed 64,853,949,435 (64.9 billion) litres of fuel in 2017. 42.7 billion litres was used for domestic routes and 22.2 billion litres on international routes.

This amount is enough to fill 1.3 billion VW Golf’s with a 50 litre fuel tank (of course, you would not want to use jet fuel)!

Unfortunately I do not have the exact figures for how many flying kilometres this amount of fuel represents. But I can estimate…

According to this Wikipedia article, jet fuel weighs 0.81 kg/l. This equates to US airlines using 52.5 billion kilograms of fuel in 2017.

Turing to Wikipedia again, a Boeing 787-9 burns 5.77 kg of fuel per km. Using this as the average figure for fuel efficiency across all US major airlines would mean that 9.1 billion kilometres was flown in 2017.

Check my calculations here.

Cost of fuel for major US airlines 2017

Full table.

These airlines paid $28,934,684,000 USD ($28.9 billion) for fuel in 2017.

You will notice American Airlines used more fuel than Delta (13.5 vs. 12.9 billion litres), but paid less for it ($5.75 vs $5.94 billion USD) in 2017. This is because airlines strategy for buying and holding fuel differs. In fact, very large teams working for airlines are solely dedicated to the task of buying fuel, for good reason.

Download chart.

There is a fairly large range in price paid per litre of jet fuel between these airlines. Frontier Airlines fuel team are doing the best job paying around $0.42 per litre in 2017. ExpressJet paid $0.67 per litre! This largely the result of economies of scale. Frontier bought 915,573,331 litres of fuel in 2017, whereas ExpressJet bought only 2,278,817 litres.

Worldwide jet fuel consumption

According to this Forbes article, there were 4 billion air travellers in 2017. The US Bureau of Transport and Statistics reports 965 million of these, or 24%, were from the US.

If 64,853,949,435 litres represents roughly 24% of all worldwide jet fuel consumption (US consumption), in 2017 airlines consumed 268,824,660,869 (269 billion) litres of jet fuel worth an estimated $120,561,183,333.

Taking the 2017 world population (7.5 billion), that means 35.8 litres of jet fuel was burned per person in 2017! And this is an underestimation (see improvements).

Improvements

The final calculations for world fuel consumption in 2017 need to be improved. I only considered fuel consumption for major US airlines, and omitted smaller airlines operating in the US and non-commercial traffic.

This means that fuel consumption in the US will be higher than the figure I used (64.8 billion litres), and thus so will the figure for fuel consumption for worldwide airlines.

tl;dr

An estimated 269 billion litres of jet fuel was burned by the largest commercial airlines in 2017 — 35.8 litres for each person on the planet.

A final note

Don’t fill your car up with jet fuel.

Footnotes

1. Data sources + data used in this post.