Speed of flight

Speed of flight: "

What if somebody came up with a way to save airlines up to 200 pounds of jet fuel each flight and more than 40,000 minutes of flight time on a fleet-wide basis per year?

You’d think that would represent a substantial savings for the environment as well as for an airline’s bottom line!

Well, somebody did come up with a way to do this. It’s called Boeing Inflight Optimization. In the latest issue of Boeing AERO magazine - now online - we’ve posted a great article detailing just how this works.

Click on the image to go directly to the latest edition of AERO.

Two products - Direct Routes and Wind Updates - are part of a suite of tools developed by Boeing Flight Services - designed to help airlines really increase their fuel and flight efficiency. Direct Routes service is currently available in the continental U.S. Wind Updates is being implemented worldwide.

Fuel is a huge piece of an airline’s operating cost - in fact it can be up to 30% of the annual operating budget. We’ve calculated that airlines can use something like 10% more fuel than is necessary because of inefficiencies in the system.

As you’ll see in the article, shaving even small slices of fuel usage (and flight time) on each and every flight can add up to pretty big fleet-wide savings.

Boeing’s Direct Routes product optimizes flights by providing reroute opportunities with at least one minute of time savings.

Boeing has captured the technology to provide real-time “actionable” advisories based on air traffic, the airplane’s flight path, weather and other factors - specific to individual airlines for both Boeing and non-Boeing fleets.

I won’t go into all the details - you can check it out in the article - but it works by monitoring each flight’s progress and continuously looking for opportunities for efficiency.

What’s great about these products is, for our customers who operate up-to-date airplanes, there’s no new equipment needed and no new training or regulatory changes. It works within current air traffic and airline operating procedures.

The idea is, with this up-to-the-second data, airline ops and flight crews can immediately identify more direct routing to their destinations and make adjustments to weather conditions, saving time and fuel.

That’s what you might call optimization at the speed of flight - and we think this is a very exciting business to be in.

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