Is trans pacific remote enough for you DCdriver ?
On a flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles the B763 uses a still air speed single engine etops of 415kts TAS. That means it must plan to stay within 1245nm of an adequate and suitable airfield. On this sector the flight has to deviate several hundred miles north of the direct track to comply with this requirement in the mid to latter stages of the flight. The airfields used are Hilo (when it's available) and Honolulu when it's not. Both are in the Hawaian group.
The critical fuel scenario on the B763 is single engine depressurised flight. i.e the ability to descend to 10,000 ft and fly on one engine from the equitime point to the alternate, have enough when you get there for an instrument approach overshoot and visual approach and landing plus 15 mins gas plus 5% contingency fuel and any PDA.
The critical fuel scenario described above will always be the limiting factor even if we ignored etops and were allowed to fly the great circle track between Tahiti and LAX. In fact more fuel would be required to cover this scenario as we would be further south of the etops track and thus further away from the enroute alternate. (Possibly 4 hours or so away on one engine.)
Thus fuel is a factor but not the bottomline of ETOPs. To comply with the regs my first statement posted is the bottomline.
