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We have all experienced that gnawing sense of worry when packing for an upcoming flight, the insidious thought that just won’t go away:
What if my luggage is over the limit?
Glancing at your branded portable luggage scale soothes the thought for a minute, but then it returns full force, even more insidious than before:
What if the scale is malfunctioning?
Airlines, being very professional, reassuring, and by no means profit-driven, are happy to assist you in stoking such fears with pop-ups and newsletters helpfully informing you that you can pay for oversized baggage or book extra baggage ahead of time and thus avoid the dreaded baggage penalties fees.
Some airlines go even so far as to give bounties to employees who spot and inflict penalties on passengers carrying even slightly oversized luggage via “random bag weight checks”.
The end result is that baggage weight has turned into one of the great terrors of flying, with millions of passengers experiencing sleepless nights over it, and the airlines raking in billions of euros.
Baggage limits have nothing to do with efficient flights
But why are airlines so obsessed with baggage weight? The answer has a lot to do with the flight’s fuel consumption: a heavier plane needs more power to overcome drag, which in turn means more fuel consumed, and higher reserve fuel requirements.
In other words, more baggage = higher expenses for the airline. Simple, right?
It may surprise you to hear then, that while airlines always claim that saving fuel is their primary interest and central to their economic performance, in reality many airlines waste large amounts of fuel on using old inefficient aircraft, flying with almost empty planes and wasting huge amounts of space on (often unsold) premium seating and services.
In other words, while airlines nickel-and-dime you with baggage fees, they ignore other ways of saving fuel, because baggage fees are mainly about extra revenue for them, not about keeping expenses low or about saving fuel.
How to save jet fuel
With the current jet fuel shortage caused by the Strait of Hormuz crisis, saving fuel has become the new priority of every airline in the world. So if an airline truly wanted to save fuel, what could they do?
The answer is obvious and immediate: stop obsessing about baggage.
Why is baggage weight relatively insignificant compared to efficiency?
Because it takes a baseline amount of power simply to keep the plane in the air, whether it’s completely empty or completely full. Overcoming gravity, pushing against drag forces, operating the engines and carrying the massive weight of the aircraft itself all involve a minimum, unavoidable level of fuel consumption.
Adding more weight in form of heavier suitcases certainly does contribute a few percent to fuel consumption, but its contribution is dwarfed by how (in)efficiently the plane is filled.
Fuel consumption per passenger mile
“Passenger mile” (“Passenger kilometer”) is a term used in the transportation industry and represents one passenger traveling a distance of one mile or kilometer, allowing for a balanced comparison between trips. It can be applied to anything from fuel consumption to carbon emissions to number of deaths in accidents and is widely used, including by think-tanks and government institutions.
For example, plane accidents are extremely disturbing and attract much attention, but accounting for how rare they are for the vast distances traversed by airplane passengers, air travel actually turns out to be the safest way of travel per passenger mile.
Statistics agree: motorcycles are incredibly dangerous, while airplanes are incredibly safe. Source: Ian Savage, Comparing the fatality risks in United States transportation modes and over time, Northwestern University
Thus, when calculating the holy grail of air travel, expenses/fuel/emissions per passenger mile, for practically any distance and any type of plane, a modest increase in baggage weight will always have a relatively small effect compared to the flight’s major attributes:
- Aircraft’s empty weight
- Fuel weight
- Passenger count
- Load factor
- Aerodynamic drag
Shocking new study finds air travel could be made 50-75% more efficient
A recent study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment (a division of the famous Nature scientific journal) examined the efficiency of 27 million flights in 2023 (out of 35 million globally in 2023) that flew between 26,000 destination pairs, rating them per CO2 emitted per kilometer per passenger.
This colossal analysis covered almost 3,5 billion passengers who flew a combined distance of 6,8 trillion km in 2023, emitting 577m tons of CO2 emissions in the process (about as much as entire Germany that year).
The lead researcher, Prof Stefan Gössling, was recently interviewed about his landmark study in The Guardian, highlighting the following fact:
“We are currently stuck with a global situation where there is no hope that aviation will reduce its emissions.” This absurd situation continues despite the fact that, as per the study’s findings, all-economy-seat planes, maintaining 95% flight occupancy rates (as opposed to the current average of 80%) and using today’s most efficient aircraft could vastly cut fuel use, slashing emissions by as much as 50 - 75%.
Wide-reaching effects on travel
The underlying study focuses on reducing carbon emissions, an important subject on its own, but given the current global shortages, it is important to note that virtually all of its conclusions apply to reducing jet fuel consumption as well. Better planning can and will result in fuel savings, alleviating the crisis.
Some of the study’s findings are quite amusing but not really applicable on any wide scale, such as the world’s most inefficient flights being within Papua New Guinea and between Ironwood (pop. 5000) to Minneapolis in USA, with those flights being 25 times less efficient than the world’s most efficient flight between Milan to Seoul.
Obviously, government-subsidized flights or flights between otherwise isolated locations that existentially depend on them should not be slammed for wasting jet fuel or producing too many carbon emissions. However, what is the excuse for major and frequent flights between large metropolitan cities (especially in the USA) having only 80% occupancy or spending that occupancy on vanity seats that aren’t any more profitable than just flying a larger and fuller route with more economy seats?
USA has the world’s most inefficient flights
Given that USA is the world’s largest national aviation market, this is a very significant finding, and not necessarily negative since it implies a large shift is possible with federal-level changes in just one country.
Source: The Guardian
On a brighter note, the study found that Europe, Connecto’s primary market, had quite efficient flights, although Brazil and India took the top spots for having the most efficient flights overall.
So the next time you fly from London to Malaga on your way to your comfortable Malaga airport transfer with Connecto, and the flight is 100% full, you can feel relieved knowing that you’re significantly contributing to global flight efficiency.
The scourge of premium flight experience
The study highlights the fact that if airlines stopped insisting on selling extremely expensive but frequently unsold premium, business and first-class seats that occupy as much as a third of their airplanes, and instead increased the amount of economy seats (or simply introduced separation and made most flights 100% economy and a minority 100% premium), average load factors would certainly improve, along with fuel efficiencies.
Instead of this happening, though, average shares of premium seating are increasing as airlines attempt to boost their prestige and cater to the 1% of wealthiest leisure travelers who take almost half all plane trips in the world.
Clogged airplane supply chains
Finally, the global disruption of supply chains hailing from a variety of factors (most infamous being the COVID-19 pandemic and the Boeing safety scandal) still hasn’t been resolved, resulting in as many as 17.000 ordered but undelivered planes and 5.000 planes sitting in storage as of 2026.
Delivering large numbers of modern planes with better fuel efficiencies would automatically boost the air industry’s sustainability, reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
Intertia is holding back change
“While airlines often claim that fuel savings are in their own economic interest, the reality is that many airlines continue to fly with old aircraft, low load factors, or growing shares of premium-class seating,” the researchers concluded, proposing various mechanisms through which this could be solved ranging from public efficiency ratings similar to those found on appliances, to government regulations limiting waste or enforcing an improved carbon credit system.
