Sunfish, you've fallen straight into the trap many airline managers did, fuel consumption is not a linear function. *cough* Boston Bruce pointed out why LCC couldn't work economically as sector length increased for this reason. He was "choosen" to go to the cosmetics industry as a consequence.
Jet transport fuel consumption is a function of time (
Fuel economy in aircraft). You consume around 3% per hour
per hour to carry it, this is, an exponential function. We could split hairs about the actual number (2.75 ~ 3.0 ~ 3.25%), but all it really does is change the inflection point in time before going exponential. For a A380 that inflection point is around 8 hours, for the B787 it may be 10 or 12 hours, I haven't seen the exact data.
This is why all the manufactures are trying to do everything they can to reduce airframe weight, to lower the burn % per hour to shift the inflection point.
The bottom line is the is not about reducing fuel costs, rather trying to increase the premium with direct point-to-point between high value financial centres. If there is a premium direct service it could potentially create an
economic moat as there won't be enough traffic for a competitor on these routes.
Originally Posted by wikipedia
Flight distance
For
long-haul flights, the airplane needs to carry additional fuel, leading to higher fuel consumption. Above a certain distance it becomes more fuel-efficient to make a halfway stop to refuel, despite the energy losses in
descent and
climb. For example, a
Boeing 777-300 reaches that point at 3,000 nautical miles (5,600 km). It is more fuel-efficient to make a
non-stop flight at less than this distance and to make a stop when covering a greater total distance.
[5]
Example: The specific range of a
Boeing 777-200 per distance
FUEL CONSUMPTION Pounds per Nautical mile as function of distance
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft