The Chicago Tribune has THIS story on American Airlines and their desire to lower the amount of fuel being carried as reserve on an average flight.  In short, AA has discovered that it is carrying an excessive amount of reserve fuel on the average flight.  What’s excessive?  Some aircraft are landing with almost twice the amount mandated by the FAA and let me point out that the FAA is a pretty conservative organization.

Predictably, American pilots see this as an instrusion on their authority and a dangerous path.   But is it?  Currently, the FAA mandates that you have 45 minutes of fuel reserves and that’s worked very,  very well over the years.  Interestingly enough, American itself requires 65 minutes of fuel reserves but the aircraft are landing with an average of 92 minutes of fuel reserves and that’s a problem. 

Why?  Because when you carry more fuel, you burn more fuel to carry that extra weight.  All American wants to do is get their average down much more closely to their mandated reserve number of 65 minutes.  Doing so would save them the cost of carry 30 extra minutes of fuel, which over the course of a year in a fleet of over 600 aircraft will translate into millions of dollars of savings. 

Captains, traditionially with final say on what fuel they’ll require for a flight, say that this is an intrustion on their authority and potentially puts them into the position of being reprimanded or fired if they do it too often because the airline wants pilots to justify extra fuel by filling out a form.   I think the pilots union would love for this to be another bone of contention between pilots and the company. 

However, every airline should be doing this for a variety of reasons.  First, we really do know how much fuel a typical flight should carry and we know that by route and model of aircraft and the process for figuring this out is genuine science and genuinely accurate.   Airlines do *not* want their flights to routinely lack enough of fuel that causes diversions, trust me.  Every flight that has to stop and refuel represents a flight that just lost a spectacular amount of money.

Does AA’s form make the process potentially punitive?  Yes, I think it does and I think it should.   American’s pilots are, quite literally, the best, most experienced pilot corps in the world.  The fact that AA’s average has gone up to 92 minutes of fuel left upon landing is shameful for those pilots.  They should be nailing the company average 10 months out of 12 and they’re not getting close.  So, yes, I think pilots should justify loading more fuel and if they’re inappropriately loading too much fuel, yes, I think they should be counseled on that too. 

Just like any other employee today in America’s workplaces who is wasteful and inefficient.

There are legitimate reasons to add additional fuel before leaving.  If an airport is particularly congested or experiencing long delays, a pilot will add extra fuel for taxi purposes.  If a flight route suddenly has developing weather crossing it, a pilot may add some additional fuel to fly around the weather.  There are other legitimate reasons as well and there is no reason why pilots can’t simply document their reasons for increasing their fuel reserves on a particular flight.

US Airways did this a couple of years ago and, yes, a few pilots were sent for extra training and counseling after repeatedly adding more fuel than necessary for flights.  Ultimately, US Airways and the pilots came to an agreement on how to work out those conflicts and the airline now saves money by meeting its reserve goals (also in excess of FAA minimums). 

This conflict is a union conflict, not a safety conflict.  More than a decade ago when fuel prices suddenly rose significantly, all Southwest Airlines had to do was communicate to their flight dispatchers and pilots that they needed to save more fuel and suddenly better, more fuel efficient altitudes were being planned and pilots were being exceptionally aggressive in requesting higher altitudes and more direct approaches to airports to save that money.  Safety wasn’t compromised and millions of dollars were saved.  If American has the most experienced crew of pilots, Southwest probably has the second most experienced crew.

At the end of the day, saving this money is essential for success in the airline world.  Pilots not only shouldn’t be pushing back on this idea, they should be embracing it and working even harder to find places for their airline to remain competitive.

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