a while back I was sitting in the back of a plane and the captain came on and
made an announcement and said so why don't the airlines or pilots fill the
gas tanks out before they leave I'll explain it all come in out hey 74 Crew
welcome back if you don't know me my name is Kelsey I'm a 747 pilot my
channel 74 gear is all about aviation today I'm here in Hanoi Vietnam
and this is a view today from the hotel now there are two main reasons that the
pilots and the airlines don't feel the gas tanks up every time before the
flight and when the captain made that announcement I heard a bunch of people
behind me grumbling saying what are they just filled up this is so stupid and I
thought hey that's a great idea for a video let's get into it first I'm going
to explain to you why the plane had to go back to the gate and get some more
gas when we show up to an aircraft it gives a fuel number and that is gonna be
a fuel number for takeoff and a fuel number for when we push out of the gate
now that number that we get to push out of the gate isn't a hard number we don't
have to have that amount of fuel on board but the fuel number that we have
before we take off we have to have that amount of fuel if
you remember in the soli video that I did both pilots were checking the fuel
number it set up a little field for their phone like 2,000 pounds required
we got or playing onboard 19,000 pounds of
that's the fuel that we need to fly to our destination Airport and in most
cases an alternate Airport or a backup Airport now why don't they fill it up
every time there's two real reasons the first one is a weight consideration
obviously an aircraft has a certain amount of weight that has to have or be
below under in order to take off and there's a certain weight number that the
plane has to be below in order to land safely meaning the gear is set up and
structured to hold a certain amount of weight upon landing if your plane is
overweight when it takes off it could get to the end of the runway and not
have enough lift or power to get it off to the ground oh this is awkward now I
personally like my job and if you saw the video that I did with Stella where
she's asking me to make my smiley face you cos you remember that my smiley face
isn't that great that is my smiley face though okay so
I'm not gonna charm anybody over a million dollars worth of damage because
I decided to land a plane a little too heavy so what I always do before we take
off and I look at every flight as I look at the numbers to make sure that we're
gonna be under weight in order to takeoff and safely get there and make
sure that we're under weight in order to land safely and not damage the aircraft
and stay within the parameters of what is safe and what is mandated by in my
case Boeing since I fly a Boeing aircraft so the other reason that we
don't take on all the gas that we can is that the more gas you're hauling it has
a weight to it as you can imagine that weight that you're hauling around is
extra deadweight because you don't necessarily need it so you end up
burning a bunch of extra fuel in order to haul fuel around so it used to be
back in the day when gas was super cheap they would just fill the tanks up it
didn't really matter but now as gas has gone up a lot in price the airlines have
found out and did the math that it's roughly one third of the extra fuel that
they're hauling around they're actually burning on hauling that fuel around I'm
sorry but I am so confused so for example if you're hauling an extra 3,000
gallons of gas around you're burning a thousand gallons of gas in order to hold
that 3,000 gallons of gas so you only actually have a net of 2,000 extra
gallons of gas and a thousand of which you burned really for no reason speaking
of jet fuel if you haven't seen the Hollywood versus reality video that I
did we Bruce Willis in Die Hard - I'm gonna put
it right here and you see them light a bunch of jet fuel on fire with a match
which you can't really do I look forward to hearing from you until then keep the
blue side up