Saving Jet Fuel

V-eHGsd_

and this would work in real life too, if only we could all climb and descend entirely at pilot's discretion, direct enter enter and never have to worry about all of the other planes doing the exact same thing.

ggm

A plot of a larger sample of post-hoc known wind and other constraints over a regular service would help enormously to sell the idea. One point at 45min faster and 25% less fuel is of course huge, but how does it map out over a year of routing?

esafak

This is pretty cool! https://github.com/airbus/scikit-decide It's nice to see the scikit brand live on.

walrus01

I am not sure how this approach would integrate with the common use of navigating between known/mapped IFR navigation waypoints: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=IFR+navig... https://skybrary.aero/articles/waypoint https://www.flyingmag.com/how-ifr-fixes-get-their-names/

contingencies

It will never work because you have too many human processes in the loop. This HN share by the author is selling the idea of consulting to obtain nominal efficiency on a well established process to human organizations who are structurally opposed to it, subject to human regulators who are structurally opposed to it, in an industry that is famous for aversion to change. Nice try drumming up clients, but realistically you're not going to move the mountain a millimeter on this one. Quicker to wait for AI airports, AI ATC and AI airlines than selling to humans at this point. 20th century humanity just about spitballed together a working system, but making it efficient is not going to happen on our watch. We would do well to admit it.

thenobsta

There's a bunch of other interesting flight path optimization work going on at https://contrails.org/ . It turns out contrails contribute to 2% of global warming power and is relatively easily avoided. The cost might be a bit more fuel consumption though.

subhro

This is highly impractical and it is evident that the author has no idea how IFR navigation and oceanic routes work. When flying on oceanic routes and even on land, you have to intercept certain waypoints and vectored into/around airspaces. I hate to be discouraging, but maybe the author should make an attempt to understand navigation before cooking up something like this.

K0balt

I have a close family member who flys airliners. He routinely laments having to burn up thousands of pounds of fuel on the ramp to adjust changes to the landing weight projections by dispatch and from over fueling. The amount of waste in a single error (and they are not that infrequent) is enough to heat my house for a year… and I live within 200 miles of the arctic circle. I mean, burning 1000 gallons of fancy diesel once in a while is a rounding error for jetliner operations, but still, it’s absurd that that is the best solution.

croemer

If you look at the "optimal" path here looks completely unrealistic/pathological. How is it optimal to zig zag like this? The grid is clearly too coarse and that's possibly not the only issue: https://tech.marksblogg.com/theme/images/flight_planning/msr...

buildsjets

This is the perfect route planning software if you are the only aircraft in the sky, and fuel is your only cost. The commercial solutions exist because they consider not only the winds and fuel costs in their optimization, but also known previously cleared ATC routings, altitude restrictions whether they are charted or only documented by letter-of-agreement, expected delays due to historical congestion, pilot and cabin crew pay, crew duty time limits (your more fuel efficient route may take longer and require an entire second crew), contracted lease, finance, insurance, and maintenance rates as these are also frequently paid by the the hour, and airport arrival curfew times. And probably a few more things too. Also, you say nothing about incorporating ETOPS routing requirements into your application, and looking at the opentop source neither does it, therefore I assume this must mean this is the first time you have seen that acronym and therefore do not understand its criticality in determining aircraft routing. Might want to have your AI agent read this Wikipedia article, because your application generates many routes that are not legal to fly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS Should I even ask if this application routes around areas that have been declared active war zones by NOTAM?

sccxy

Good exercise but as useful as Google maps would implement "ignore traffic rules" option to save fuel.

dmitrygr

Grepped TFA for "IFR", "NOTAM", "oceanic", "RVSM", "ETOPS", and "TFR". No results -> no point reading any further -- might as well ask my cat to opine on neurosurgery. - a pilot