Not a flight buff, but...

- Jet fuel from NYC to LAX seems to cost ~$10k.[1]

- You pay a pilot $50 / hour salary. (+100% more with benefits?)[2]

- Double all of that for a bunch of random things I can't think of (airport fees?)

My napkin math seems to indicate this couldn't possibly cost Boeing more than $10-20k? Pretty small potatoes to such a large company.

[1] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-airliner-fuel-cost/ [2] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Commercial-Pilot-Salar...

Then count the fame you get for it... and it actually _increases_ value!

Although destroying the environment for a PR win can quickly turn into a PR loss when someone on twitter calculates how many polar bears this will kill...

That is a textbook case of buzzkill.

Being a buzzkill doesn't make it less true, though. I'm disappointed to see the parent comment being downvoted.

It's pedantic buzz killery, which is boring and lame.

Are we going to... not fly planes any more? Drive cars? Deliver cargo? Take trips to visit family in another town/state/country?

"Hey Tim, how was the weekend?"

"Great. I drove down to Portland to see my mom after her surgery, she's doing gr--"

"You decided to spend your weekend destroying the environment?!"

It may be true, but I would expect this sort of waste is a drop in the bucket -- drop in the swimming pool, even -- compared to all the waste going on over the rest of the planet during the same time period.

That's not to say we shouldn't avoid waste, but this flight was a pretty momentous occasion (final delivery flight of a 747), and I think it's appropriate to mark that occasion in some unique manner. Burning a bunch of extra jet fuel doesn't seem all that inappropriate, especially considering the total amount of jet fuel burned in a given day.

There's just really no need for such buzzkillery.

> drop in the swimming pool

That's pretty close. It could be a good chance to educate people, perhaps, without turning it into a buzzkill. "This plane burned 27 tons of fuel for that pretty pattern in the sky, but if that sounds like a lot of fuel just wait until you find out that planes burn a million tons every day!"

A single plane has less of an ability to "Destro The Environment" than a Single Politician.

While that's true that no individual action matters, it's also true that our individual actions taken as a whole has an impact on the world, and because of that, we must treat individual actions as though they had the impact of collective actions.

Collective individuals have simply no way of affecting the environment in any major way simply by collective behavior change. The only thing that will change things is positive policies that encourage good behavior through positive methods.

For example by making electric vehicles attractive Tesla did more for the environment than possibly any single company ever by causing the shift to EVs in the general populace’s psyche.

Alternatively by doing things like banning plastic straws you instead get malicious compliance and dislike for the policies. That will never change things in a positive direction in the long term.

In that case we are basically fucked. Nobody is going to be elected on a platform of banning things that are fun.

All human action is individual human action. It got us into this problem, and is the only thing thay will fix it.

Individuals who can do things that will change the behavior of others through positive reinforcement can change things or by going to work at a company that was started with one of those efforts in mind. For example one of the biggest impact things an individual could do right now for climate change is to figure out a way to make a concrete that’s cheaper than concrete but not made in the method that releases CO2 and start a business out of it.

My only point was about _collective_ behavior change that is often advertised as a way to stop climate change that is advertised by many. I think that’s completely pointless and impossible. For example I do nothing to conserve anything in my day to day actions other than not wasting money or time. So if you can make CO2 reduction possibly simply by saving money and time then it’ll happen automatically.

Also I’m not so pessimistic about the current direction as you. We’re headed for a 3 degrees C change in temperature which isn’t going to have the most disastrous impacts that could have happened. There’s still also a lot of emerging tech that could play out and reduce those predictions further.

Well polar bears are not affected first off, and secondly the amount of CO2 is basically nothing compared to even the daily world CO2 production.

> My napkin math seems to indicate this couldn't possibly cost Boeing more than $10-20k? Pretty small potatoes to such a large company.

Yeah they were losing billions through criminal negligence and delayed deliveries of the 737 Max, so a couple of tens of thousands for some well needed good PR is nothing. This is probably the first bit of it for multiple years now, with all the delays in the 777X, assembly quality issues of 787, etc.

It feels to me like a final swan song for the era, both corporate and economic, in which a project like the 747 was possible.

Yeah but they are also a major contributor to our breakaway UAP program with Lockheed - and also, the Horse fucking industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case

That link was... an interesting read. I'd say it merits a NSFW tag but it's kind of obvious from the title.

> Pinyan had previously lost the ability to experience certain sensations after a motorcycle accident, and he had begun to seek out increasingly extreme sexual acts

Almost feel bad for the guy if it weren't for the animal cruelty.

You pay a 747 pilot way more than $50/hour.

https://www.aviationinterviews.com/pilot/payrates/united-par...

Seems weird.. you get payed $39/hour in your first year.. then jump all the way up to $239/hour in your second year and never really get a raise beyond that?

The link there is specifically UPS, which is union.

I guess it is probably the case that guys with a couple years experience are doing about the same work as guys with 10 years (plane smoothly and safely goes from A to B).

I had assumed it was an error.

They more than $20k's worth of publicity from the stunt. Totally worth it.

Does that napkin math subtract the cost of the same delivery flight but without the stunt?

I didn't read about the flight but I assume that delivery was happening anyway, with or without the stunt. I am guessing it took an hour or two extra, so the fuel and pilot salary cost should only be what was extra in addition to the regular flight amount?

There isn't a 747 pilot on the planet making only $50/hr

I don't know anything about flight deliveries. But, including a set of basic flight maneuvers makes sense to me. In which case they would be maneuvering anyway and they decided to go out in style. Big salutes to them who set it up.

By the time the plane is delivered, it has already been fully flight tested.

Yeah, you don't want to find the problems on the delivery flight.

Better then than on the first passenger filled flight. Don't think of it as the delivery flight. Think of it is final test flight

This is a cargo plane, though, I don't think a passenger 747 has been built in a while.

same difference

You can tell nobody from Nascar was involved as there are both left AND right turns.

Fun fact: not all nascar tracks are left turn only.

Yeah when you race them backwards they're right turn only.

Wisdom of crowds and all that, i’m guessing around $30k ?

My working was:

+2 hours (a path that should take 0.5 hours took 2.5h according to flight radar)

According to a random aviation site, an unspecified 747 revision at unspecified altitude with unspecified engines burns 4 litres per second, so take that with a bag of salt!

Jet A1 fuel at $1/litre-ish

$30k-ish ?

Back of envelope ... 1 gallon of fuel per second [0], 2.5 hrs, $2.5 per gallon = $22,500

That's uh...pretty rough and I'm not a flight buff, but wanted to do the bare minimum for the exercise.

[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/qu...

* edited the ppg

There's cost and opportunity cost and marketing, so who knows? But it looks like it doubled the leg length, I'd guess cost and opportunity cost into the 100k+.

Former pilot here: $3-4 million easy. FAA regulations alone require $500k per sky-number drawn by any aircraft [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKOFTEN

You might have the wrong link there.

Citation needed?

Your link is for an old covert drug research program?

i think you either linked to the wrong article or i misunderstood a joke

I think the link you are looking for is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/PEBCAK.

I'm guessing it is in the range of 50..60k. The sibling posts come up with lower values, including only fuel, ignoring the cost of the required regular (flight hours in this case) maintenance.

Well the plane is about to be decommissioned, so I guess the additional tach hours don’t come with a cost.

Decommissioned? It's brand new.

Costs them $0 if they just bill the customer who the delivery was for.

Only if the customer wants to pay extra for the stunt

Do it as part of a flight that needs to happen anyway (such as this one, which was a delivery)? Probably not much more than the fuel and overtime the pilots needed to fly a few extra turns.

Someone in a different thread estimated 2.4 tons of fuel, equating to 16.8 tons of CO2 emissions

For comparison the average US household produces ~7.5 tons of CO2 emissions every year so that's ~2.24 years of the average household's emissions