Airline defends 5-passenger flight
There was plenty of elbow room for passengers on a recent Chicago-to-London flight as an American Airlines jet carried just five passengers, a decision that has sparked outrage in the environmental community. According to a CNN report, the flight consumed about 68,000 liters (15,000 imperial gallons) — or 13,000 liters per passenger — of jet fuel for the nine-hour trip. “Flying virtually empty planes is an obscene waste of fuel. Through no fault of their own, each passenger’s carbon footprint for this flight is about 45 times what it would have been if the plane had been full,” Friends of the Earth’s transport campaigner Richard Dyer said. The airline said that while it considered canceling the flight, the plane was due in London to carry passengers to the United States. The airline also said that the plane carried a full cargo load.
You may also be interested in these articles
Comments
3 Responses to “Airline defends 5-passenger flight”
Please share your thoughts...
…and frankly, I think people in the environmental community, and elsewhere, should have better things to do than police every flight by every airline in search of something to get hysterical about. Seems to me that the airline (any airline) wouldn’t operate a flight like this without good reason. I don’t believe they’re in business to lose money. Yes, we’re all aware of the global threat, but how about a little rational thinking instead of the typical knee-jerk response.
I think that Catherine is entirely correct. We all need to protect the environment, but at the same time, it is not feasable to disrupt schedules. There is a built in remedy for causing airlines not to waste fuel, and it is called capitalism. They won’t run the flight if it loses money on a continual basis. You cannot micromanage issues like that. What is the cost of disruption to all of those people? Would 300 people have been inconvenieneced on the return flight had the plane not flown?
The environmentalist community needs to cull the idiots from their ranks. Of course, that may not leave many left.
And , of course, there is the tremendous waste assoiated with training people to fly the planes to begin with. Quite possibly some of those flites are devoid of paying customers also, and on top of that, what about the tremendous fuel waste if the pilot trained in the military? I mean, those planes are really fuel hogs. We could cut down on the amount of training and really cut some signif carbon emissions. Would a few odd crashes here and ther be worth the savings in C? And, lets be honest, wouldn’t we all feel nobler if we had the purpose of a trip and its costs to the environment vetted by a certified enviro before we could go? I think the greener-than-thou crowd should be invited to pee up a rope.