mh152, I am happy that you and a couple of others see the fixation on reduced fuel burn as but a small part of the actual complex cost of operations.

and then there are pilots getting paid by actual block time and pilots getting paid by calculated block time.

some of these colleagues taxi with 10 knots on runway parallel taxiways at the end of the day to produce lates and thus more money and days off.

factored block times and paid calculated factored block times will achieve a pilot trying to work less for same money. higher fuel cost, but lower maintenance etc costs.

I (FO 320 allowed to taxi and park the Bus) hate taxi behind Lufthansa group, Turkish and Austrian. We always sniff in their ass on the taxiway and they block others.

I don't think anyone is down playing the importance of trying for a reduction in fuel burn, yes ops costs are important, but when at the moment the cost of overnight HOTAC etc in the vicinity of a major airport could quickly add up to the same as a tonne of avtur there is perhaps the argument that it perhaps fuel burn isn't the only thing that needs to be considered if you are really interested in the bottom line.

Whilst I agree with a lot of the above, we as flight crew are not aware of the whole story. We don't know what a hotel room around the airport will cost. We don't know what it will cost to throw one of our punters on a different airline's aircraft, we don't know what percentage of our punters will claim eu261 compensation.

We like to think we know better than others but in reality we don't. We do not know how much it will cost to get joe bloggs from Paris to Heathrow to Kennedy. I have regularly been given high speed flight plans and I have been asked to slow down. I am absolutely happy to do everything to the best of my ability to reduce costs. But I will also fly the plan. At worst if I don't I'll lose a third pilot or an extra day off or..........

Likewise...so maybe just saving fuel isn't the company's goal 100% of the time..


But I know a man who does ....certainly around one of the London airports even at a "bulk" rate it soon adds and if you are dealing with a group missing a conection it pretty quickly wipes out that 300 kg of fuel you saved over 10 or more hours..

I wouldn't advocate running around with the leading edges glowing, and a combination of flying the plan whilst also trying to fit in with whatever arrival pucntuality SOP your company has seems fair..

I have a giggle at how dumb we are every time we single engine taxi out to save 50 lbs of gas and then rush the checklist and engine warm up as a result followed by 0.8 all the way home transcon over burning 500-800 lbs of gas to catch a commute flight!!!!

We are pilots, who approach the OP question with technical answers. The real answer is that airlines don't actually worry about saving fuel. They want to save money!. Fuel and money may not be the same thing;sometimes. At my company, right now, they are attempting to save money.

We fly the flight plan with single engine taxi when we can. I get ACARS messages sometimes asking me to slow down, on a transcon, to allow better flow at the Hub for a Hub bank. We fly high speed sometimes because they want the airplane somewhere so another crew can get another hour of utilization that day.

There is a giant computer system in Dallas that makes these decisions along with folks in the System Control Center. I just fly the airplane they way they tell me, mostly, and let them worry about the big picture of the airline. There are almost a thousand airplanes and an average of nearly 6,700 flights per day to nearly 350 destinations in more than 50 countries.

It's sort of like the Army...Shut up and do like you are told. The only difference is it pays better and I don't have to salute anyone and we don't have bombs or heavy artillery.

Zaphod
Very professional airline. I think that's the way to go. The whole picture! rather than everyone trying to fiddle with the CI, without knowing what lies ahead.