Aeroplanes use less fuel than cars

Flybe use the De Havilland Dash-8 Q400 Turboprop for their internal business flights. Take for example their flight from Manchester to Exeter. In the car, this journey is 240 miles [1], and let's suppose the plane takes a similar-length route.

The plane holds 80 people, and has a maximum range of 1567 miles on a full tank (6526 litres), based on pretty much a full plane [2]. The journey is about 15% of the plane's maximum range, so let's say it uses 15% of a full-tank. This works out to be roughly 1000 litres of aviation fuel, with an almost full load.

If the same 80 people drove 80 cars on the same journey, and each of them were achieving 50 miles/gallon (a very generous assumption!). For the whole journey, they would use a total of 384 gallons, or 1745 litres of fuel. This is in spite of that fact that both aviation fuel and unleaded petrol/gasoline exhibit similar energy densities (~45MJ/kg) [3][4].

[1] AA Route Planner
[2] http://www.q400.com/q400/en/specifications.jsp
[3] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/EvelynGofman.shtml
[4] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml

Image courtesy of preshaa