True, but some pilots spend a lot of time getting to and from their aircraft.
The First Officer only make $17,000/year (in 2009), so she could not afford to live near her base. She had to live with her parents near Seattle, and commute to Newark, NJ.
That’s a helluva commute. Yikes.
And then there’s this, for those needing a bit of Monday aviation adorableness:
If it’s the flight I’m thinking of both pilots had issues beyond sleep. And at that pay rate you’re getting paid to log hrs and presumably learn how not to crash planes.
That is somewhat out of date, I think. Salaries at regional airlines have increased a lot since then, especially in the past year or so with airlines struggling to re-hire pilots after pilots after the pandemic. But probably still not enough to allow them to live in some of the most expensive parts of the country.
And the mandatory rest rules have changed since then, as well. Back then the 8 hour rest period simply started when the crew went off duty, and ended when they went on duty the next day. But that meant time spent traveling to and from the hotel, eating, and other activities were considered part of the “rest” period, and may have only allowed for as little as five hours of actual sleep. Now the rules have been revised so that 8 hours of rest actually means 8 hours in the hotel room.
I suspect what @Whack-a-Mole really meant was talking about circadian disruption. Not just numbers of hours at work and at rest, but the consequences of your daily wake/sleep schedule changing by a bunch of hours rather often.
I’ve had weeks where we parked the jet at 2am and a couple days later woke up at 3am to start the workday. Or vice versa. As has anyone who’s been in the industry for long. Really slewing your wake/sleep cycle around by several hours in either direction is a PITA. Many people who leave commercial aviation do it to get away from that necessity. There’s also a difference between long-haul, national-haul, and short-haul and between east/west operations versus north/south operations. Different folks have different personal preferences and generally try to avoid the sort of work that disagrees with them. In many cases folks will forego promotions and pay to stay more in control of their schedule.
As an example, my preference is early morning. Wake up at 4 to 5 am, get to work by 6, launch at 7am and be done by 4pm. Then eat, sleep and do it again tomorrow. I could do that week in and week out. Ask me to start at 5pm and finish at 2am and I’m a zombie by the third day. Even with a nap in the afternoon it’s still just not me.
Reaching back to the DST thread, I suppose I’d say that there’s plenty of evidence that some people’s circadian systems are deeply deranged by a sudden one-hour shift. Though those same people ride around the Earth’s orbit every year and deal adequately with the 3-5 minutes per day change that happens naturally. And for most folks, a one hour change is trivial. Those folks’ innate sense of “what time is it?” may be off for a week or so, but they’re not depressed, angry, or an accident waiting to happen.
There was a short item on CBC Radio today while I was driving around, about fueling jetliners with used cooking oil. It was supposed to be quite novel and shocking to the listeners, but inasmuch as jet fuel is basically kerosene which in turn bears some resemblance to diesel fuel I didn’t find it all that surprising, since diesel engines can (with some minor tweaks) run on used cooking oil. One owner of a Mercedes diesel thus converted once claimed that although his source of fuel from local restaurants was now free, his car’s exhaust smelled like French fries.
But apparently this has been happening experimentally for some time. Below is a related story, but the news today was that Westjet was going to be flying a regular route (between YYC and SFO, if I remember correctly) using 30% cooking oil.
I hope they don’t run into the same problem I did when I used vegetable oil in my electric chainsaw. It eventually clogged up.
SAF AKA Sustainable Aviation Fuel isn’t “cooking oil”.
It’s cooking oil that has been treated chemically to be substantially identical in all respects to petroleum-based jet fuel. Which you quite rightly say is merely slightly fancified kerosene.
Said another way, you run crude oil straight from the ground through a refining / reforming process and jet fuel comes out the other end. You run cooking oil through an analogous refining / reforming process and SAF comes out the other end. The SAF & ordinary jet fuel are all but chemically identical. The feedstocks are different, and the process is different, but the outcome is the same.
Said yet another way, the whole point to SAF is to put all the changes back at the chemical plant so they don’t need to make any changes to the airplane and the monstrous paper trial of design approvals associated with it.
What does the energy budget for producing that kerosene look like? And is there enough cooking oil being used to be able to provide a significant amount of jet fuel?
The issue of supply is the long pole in any synfuel project, whether we’re making kerosene for jets, or diesel for trucks & trains.
Some biz consultants (Gartner maybe?) wrote a scathing rebuttal a year-ish ago of the whole idea as, among other things, being unable to scale above lab experiments due to lack of feedstock volume.
I only know that I personally don’t know. But I have the same suspicions you do.
Well, if you don’t mind your car smelling like french fries I imagine some people could gather used oil for free from local Burger King restaurants and power their car (a few years ago I saw a video of a guy who did exactly that).
But, I cannot imagine it ever being enough to power anywhere near a substantial number of vehicles and almost certainly not planes (beyond some proof that it can be done).
Just my $0.02
Thanks for that important clarification – I wasn’t aware of that. So quite different than my Mercedes diesel example, which was literally used cooking oil collected from local restaurants, which presumably the guy at least filtered.
Regarding the question of supply and scalability, I don’t know the answer either, but Westjet is getting its supply from a large multinational called Neste that is based in Finland but has a global presence. On their website Neste claims that they currently produce 100,000 tons of SAF and production will increase to 1.5 million tons (around 1.875 billion litres) annually by the end of 2023. Of course every company with novel ideas is optimistic about its prospects, but this ain’t no backyard operation.
They say the feedstock consists of things like used cooking oil, animal fat waste and other waste and residues from vegetable oil processing. They have a short description of the refining process they use:
SAF is made from hydrocarbon molecules through a process called hydrodeoxygenation. Oxygen originating from renewable raw materials is removed with the help of additional hydrogen. Other impurities, like sulphur and nitrogen, are also removed during this process. Hydrocarbons are then isomerized to fine-tune the properties of the end products into SAF and other renewables. During this process, the hydrocarbon structure is branched to create the desired properties, a unique element of our proprietary NEXBTL™ technology. After the isomerization step is completed, further distillation is completed so that SAF fully meets ASTM 7566 requirements.
From what I can tell, ASTM D7566 is "Standard Specification for Aviation Turbine Fuel Containing Synthesized Hydrocarbons”.
Did some quick back-of-the envelope calculations to put this in perspective. Data from Statista on global commercial aviation fuel consumption (projected for 2022), almost all of which I presume is consumed by jets and turboprops, says 200,000,000 tons in 2020, which is less than 2/3 of the pre-COVID projection for 2020, and less than actual consumption in 2019. But just using that number anyway, it means that if Neste was actually able to meet their annual SAF production goals by the end of 2023, they’d be supplying just 0.75% of the commercial jet fuel market. That’s not nothing, but it’s not game-changing, either.
Is there any reason the oil has to be used before becoming jet fuel? If the technology works and there’s more demand than the restaurants of the world can meet, farmers can start planting more peanuts or rapeseed (or whatever makes the best fuel) and the oil will go directly to airplanes having never touched a french fry. Maybe that wouldn’t be economically viable, but it’s not like the yearly supply of vegetable oil is fixed at its current level.
I think these ideas have promise even as a fuel for grid backup.
One of the issues (THE issue) with solar is not just that it’s intermittent, but that the difference in production between winter and summer can be 3X-4X in northern countries where most consumption happens. This means you have to overbuild solar by a factor of four for summer if you hope to have reasonable solar power in the winter. One solution to that is to use the summer overcapacity to power reclamation facilities like this, producing fuel for airplanes or even fuel to run in turbines to provide power when the sun isn’t shining. So I’m all for continuing these kinds of experiments. I don’t think they’ll make much of a dent in airline fuel use before 2040, though.
Or, build some north-south grids. I really fail to understand the logic of thinking long-range electrical connections are impossible, or that there’s some great downside in relying on an outside source (perhaps a friendly neighboring country); while at the same time thinking that multi-thousand-mile oil pipelines are ok, as well as a dependence on unfriendly foreign nations. There’s a weird disconnect there.
Just build lots of solar in the south and some HVDC interconnects. It’s not that complicated compared to all the other stuff we’re already doing.
We already buy energy from Saskatchewan, BC, Manitoba and one or two other states in the U.S. But they are all in the same boat, with energy shortages and a heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
I am not a fan of a North American supergrid for risk reasons. Knowing the incentives politicians operate under, once we have a grid like,that we will drive it to 99% capacity and eventually there will be a massive grid failure. And you would be surprised how often wind and solar go offline over vast swaths of land, as in, the entire coast or the entire midwest. You can get rid of some variance by tying grids together, at the cost of increasing systemic risk when the outlier events happen. I remember reading that even in the case of a North American supergrid, there would still be multiple 24+ hour events in a year that would cause power on the entire grid to fall way below demand.
Here’s what our power situation looks like right now:
This is pretty typical for nighttime, but daytime in winter isn’t much better.
Here’s what solar looked like in Alberta in October:
And wind:
The shaded area in each graph is capacity. Note that we don’t come anywhere close, and there are a lot of multi-day gaps.
We have close to 25% capacity of wind and solar. Here’s what we actually got out of it in October:
Our huge investment in solar provided 2% of our power. And October isn’t nearly as bad as Nov-Feb. These are huge gaps that are not easy to fill by others once we are all on the wind and solar train.
Moderating:
This and the next two posts are drifting pretty far from “aviation”. I’m happy to move them to a new thread if you’d like to continue this conversation (DM me) but they don’t belong in this thread.
deleting post
This is not good:
Boeing B-17 and Bell P-63.
Blurring the video link since it might be upsetting.
This happened just a few miles from my house. I’d been seeing the B-17 fly around with the squadron of Zeros and Kates following it all morning. I understand they were selling rides on the B-17 for charity. Totally heartbreaking.