Trunkles at Large

I’m a curious sort of bloke. In my quest for meaningless knowledge I looked up how much fuel a jumbo jet uses. A Boeing 747-400 uses 16.1 litres of fuel per kilometre, which feels like a shitload of gas! Particularly when you find out that a Ford Mondeo with a 2 litre engine uses only 8 litres per 100 kilometres it travels.

Being inquisitive I looked at these figures a little further. Simple arithmetic gives us 0.058824 kilometres per litre for the 747 and 12.5 kilometres per litre for the Mondeo.

Let’s now factor in the weight. A Mondeo, with 4 people in it and a bit of stuff in the boot weighs roughly two tonnes, maximum takeoff weight for a 747-400 is 396.89 tonnes.

The Mondeo is, therefore, travelling roughly 25 kilometres per litre per tonne. The jumbo is travelling 23.35 kilometres per litre per tonne, so it isn’t actually that much worse once you have taken the weight into account.

There is, however, one enormous factor that isn’t shown above. The jumbo is traveling at best part of TEN TIMES the speed of the Mondeo but using only a fraction more fuel per tonne to do it.

Which makes me think that the jumbo jet is,actually very fuel efficient, when compared to a fairly standard saloon car. And I bet driving a jumbo is way more fun than a Mondeo!