What Kind Of MPG Does A Commercial Airplane Get?

One of the things many buyers look at when purchasing a car is its fuel efficiency. After all, you have to pay for gas, so owning one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the market will definitely help out your wallet. This is no different when someone is buying an airplane — whether for themselves or for a company. In fact, fuel is one of the two major expenses of any airline; this accounts for around 20% of its operational costs and could make or break the company in the short term.

This is why airline manufacturers are always looking for ways to improve the fuel efficiency of their jets. Although other factors like acquisition costs, range, capacity, maintenance, fleet commonality, and geopolitics could influence which airplane models a company will opt for, how much jet fuel a particular aircraft model uses per flight is also one of the things that a company would look at when making a purchase decision. This is the reason why the Convair 990 Coronado, one of the fastest airliners to every take to skies, was a failure.

However, an airliner's fuel efficiency isn't exactly measured the same way we measure it in cars. So, this is how aircraft manufacturers and airlines measure the fuel efficiency of a commercial jet.

It's simple to measure a car's fuel economy — many have an mpg rating right on the dashboard now. If you have an older vehicle, and it doesn't show that value, you could do it manually by filling up your car's fuel tank to full and resetting the trip computer. When you need to gas up again, just fill it up to full and write down how many miles you've traveled. You can then divide the number of miles you've driven by the number of gallons the pump showed you, and you'll see your car's fuel efficiency.

However, airliners do not use the same equation when measuring fuel economy because the numbers would look way off. Take the Boeing 747's fuel requirements, for example. The newest Boeing 747-8i model has a fuel capacity of 64,000 U.S. gallons (other types can carry as little as 48,000 gal) to fly its max range of 7,760 nautical miles or 8,930 statute miles (this is the value we use for cars). There are several other factors that will come into this computation, but for simplicity, we'll just use these numbers. So, if we want to get its mpg, we divide 8,930 miles by 64,000 US gallons — this gives us a miniscule value of 0.14 miles per gallon of fuel burned — which sounds like it's not exactly a gas sipper.

If airlines operated this way, no airline would be profitable and flying would be unattainable except for the ultra-wealthy. Thankfully, we're forgetting one thing — airlines can seat hundreds of passengers. At maximum capacity, the 747-8i can seat 467 passengers. So, if we multiply the 0.14 mpg value with the number of people in the plane (assuming the plane is full), we get 65 miles per gallon per seat, making it far more fuel efficient than the Toyota Prius.