Originally Posted by
artee
Useless snippet - I was queueing to get on a 400 on my way to Sydney, not long after Qantas had run a non-stop LHR-SYD demo flight to get lots of publicity. I started talking to the guy next to me, who worked with Shell. He said that the fuel for the Qantas flight was specially made in Germany and trucked over to London for the flight. Apparently it had a higher energy density, or something like that.
Sounds plausible - Qantas bought some increased TO weight 747-400s - 910k IIRC (I think Qantas labeled them "Long Reach"). However, even with the increased TO weight, fuel volume could become the limiting factor - higher specific gravity fuel could address that (the energy value in fuel pretty much tracks with the specific gravity).
I know that over the years, some racing teams have used higher specific gravity gasoline to allow richer engine fuel settings (e.g. more power).
BTW megan - I know the aircraft was delivered at one point - maybe Boeing agreed to take it back at some point (after a substantial 'restocking' fee). Non-deliveries could really throw a wrench in the cert process since the Cert process required us to call out the line number of the first delivery of any newly certified changes. I know I personally got crossed up with the Transaero went bust - I had a change with the initial implementation on the first Transaero delivery (which I didn't know didn't deliver at the time). FAA got all bent out of shape because we didn't properly identify the change implementation - Cert blamed it on me, made me write a disclosure, and assigned me the task of creating a corrective action plan to make sure it didn't happen again. So I put together a plan that threw it back at Cert with a plan that would force them to provide planned delivery schedules to all the various ARs on a weekly basis, with any changes from the previous schedule called out. Funny, I never heard back from them on that one...