Aren jet aircraft getting more efficient?
Planes designs are getting slowly more fuel efficient – due to better engines, drag coefficient and lighter materials. But the rate of improvement is very slow, around 1% per year. Most improvement comes on the introduction of a radically new design, for instance the A380 (first commercial flight 2007?) is 12% more efficient than the 747-400 (first commercial flight1989), i.e. 12% improvement in 18 years. Many of these newer designs are irrelevant to Staverton as they are too big to use the airport. The design life for new planes is over 30 years and an airline needs to fly planes for a very large fraction of this time to afford to buy them. This means that it is unlikely that technical improvements will be deployed even at a 1% rate. Jet aircraft are only now reaching the level of efficiencies that propeller aircraft had in the early 1960’s – the difference being that jets are larger, faster and have a longer range, meaning more people can fly further and more often – all of which inc
