How many gallons of fuel does an airplane use up per day?

Question

And how much would this add up to if you totalled the usage of each and every flight that leaves the ground per day in one country, such as the U.S.?

Answer 1

There is an old rule of thumb that we got from birds. A bird generally has to eat its own weight every 24 hours. Believe it or not, this ROUGHLY translates to airplanes as well. There are so many different aircraft and engines that your question can't be answered directly because each one burns a different amount of fuel. My plane, a cabin-class twin, burns about 35 gallons of gasoline per hour. This translates to about 210 pounds per hour. That times 24 hours equals 5,040 pounds. My plane's empty weight is about 4300 pounds, so you can see that it burns ROUGHLY its own weight in fuel. Total fuel consumption of all aircraft that fly each day in the US would come to millions of gallons of avgas and jet fuel. You'd need a lot of information to figure it accurately.

Answer 2

If you talking about planes commercially, An average sized jet, B737 for example, from Boston to Miami, will take about 27,000lbs of fuel, which when divided by the density of the fuel for the day (depends on the temperature). The average density is 6.7lbs per gln. so... It take about 4000 gallons of fuel.....With that being said. One 737 aircraft flying domesticaly, I'm guessing, makes an average of 6 legs a day to different parts of the country, probly burns like 20,000 gallons of fuel a day. It is a very broad question though.

Answer 3

Well that really depends on the plane.
A smaller jet plane that holds about 150 passengers, can hold about 8,000 gallons of fuel in one tank and would fly about 6-10 times a day, depending on the airline.
So that's about 60,000-80,000 gallons of fuel daily.
Maybe it's a smaller turbo propeller passenger airplane. Those hold about 1,000 gallins of fuel and can fly 5-8 times a day. So that's about 5,000-8,000 gallons a day.
Now maybe you are thinking of a very large airplane that holds about 300-400 passengers. Those can hold about 30,000-40,000 gallons of fuel and can fly 1-3 times a day. thats about 40.000-140,000 gallons daily.
Then you got the Boeing 747s, the largest passenger airplane in the world. Those girls can hold 60,000 gallons daily and fly 1-3 times a day. That's about 120,000-180,000 gallons a day.
I hope this answers your question.

Answer 4

the average Boeing uses 4.2 gallons per mile. just plug in the cruising speed and the hours it flys each day.

I figure that on average it would be about 26,000 gallons a day.

Not bad considering that it would move 300 people 6400 miles each, which works out to 73mpg per person.

Answer 5

Fuel burn of various business jets can be found at: http://www.jets.com/business_jets_ResearchJets.aspx

Answer 6

None if the plane doesn't fly.