PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Can an airliner make it around the world unrefueld
Old 20th Oct 2014, 07:05
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wiggy
 
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Trouble with the question is once you start ignoring pesky things like structural limits the whole thing is moot. I could get a 777-200 round the world non-stop if I assumed a 2000 knot tailwind or the burn was a tonne an hour.......

Anyhow in the real world and honouring at least Max take-off weight (structural) here's a very ballpark, very much back of the envelope stuff/top of the head stuff/extrapolation so I hope the purists/performance folks will forgive me. IMHO the answer is : No, nowhere near.

Here's why: Take London-Singapore - great circle distance is near enough 10,000km ( the circumference of the earth is 40,000 km). In the real world on a favourable day your average 777-200 can lift full'ish tanks plus perhaps 40-50 tonnes of payload and fly it from London to Singapore, (probably with a tail wind), and get there with legal reserves, maybe worth another 1 hour and a half's flying max) - remember that was taking off out of London at or close to maximum allowable structural weight...

I guess if you stripped out all internal fittings but left the basic structure intact, you could maybe swap your 40-50 tonnes of payload to 40-50 tonnes of fuel, carried presumably in using some fuselage tank(s). That will only probably give you maybe another 7'ish hours in the cruise at normal burn. I suppose it's just possible that if you assume the burn/hour value will gets lots lower than we normally see in the cruise, because the aircraft weight is going to be unusually low, so all in all you might get out towards 10 hours of extra cruise but no promises (I'm not going to dive into the manuals at the moment so I might be being very generous) .....Looks like you might just perhaps squeeze out another 10,000 km of travel beyond the norm if you had very favourable winds and burnt all reserves i.e. ran to tanks dry


So, if you're lucky, close to halfway around the world (great circle distance), give or take.

Of course if you go back to the OP's scenario and have an infinite runway and ignore max take-off weight it may be possible, but I guess you might then be able to taxi all the way ..oh hold on, there's the maximum allowable taxi weight to consider

Last edited by wiggy; 20th Oct 2014 at 18:43.
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