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- Hacker News
- 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.
by subhro - Is it worthwhile para-droping or glide-dropping excess fuel within airport open grounds reserved for that purpose.
I understand that floating into the main theatre will be a serious problem. Current weather should allow making those calls.
There's also the aspect of saving money by purchasing fuel where it's cheap and having internal fuel reserves low enough at such airports so that it can be bought in significant quantities.
As you can see from my comments, I am a complete newbie, just a curious one.
by srean - Hi author, where did the aircraft and engine data come from?
That data looks to be rather arbitrary. Real aircraft performance is hugely dependent on aircraft weight, altitude, and ambient (air) temperature. And engine performance is very dependent on air temperature and airspeed. So your table of cruise/climb speeds etc might produce interesting results but the results are not going to be at all realistic.
To give you an idea of data complexity, all airliners come with hundreds or thousands of pages of closely printed tables giving performance at specified weight, temperature, altitude, etc.
by drpixie - I have no doubt that Dr. J. Sun, tenured assistant professor at the TU Delft faculty of Aerospace Engineering, has absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the impact of temperature on aircraft performance.
> To give you an idea of data complexity, all airliners come with hundreds or thousands of pages of closely printed tables giving performance at specified weight, temperature, altitude, etc.
Make you wonder about who comes up with the theory on how to write those performance tables..
Scikit-decide, hosted by Airbus.
by fransje26 - 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...
by walrus01 - 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.
by thenobsta - Fun fact, contrails contribute to global warming, but only at night.
During the day they have a cooling effect by reflecting/blocking some light.
The optimal is not to eliminate them entirely, but to create them only early in the day so that they dissipate by sunset.
- The fuel consumption feels like the bigger problem since contrails last for hours vs co2 that lasts damn near forever.by hackernud3s
- 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.by V-eHGsd_
- And never have to intercept certain waypoints when entering different classes of controlled airspace on the correct general heading to line up for a documented runway approach.by walrus01
- I think the point of this is simply to show off the author's data science and analysis skills as an advertisement for hiring them as a consultant. Certainty I hope it's not one of those intelligent outsider attempts at an obvious-but-very-wrong solution to an established problem in a complex domain (HN comment thread is the appropriate place for those.)by scrumper
- We shouldn't just try to save jet fuel, we should also try to avoid contrails -- only about 5% of flights generate them, but they cause roughly half of the global warming caused by flights in general. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qBPwloCdRKwby gcanyon
- 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...by croemer
- I think it’s not a great illustration; the map looks like mercator so the shortest path would be curved and closer to the green path anyway. the red line is not “as the crow flies”. It would be more fair to show deviation from the actual (great circle) shortest path. Also agree the grid seems coarse.by cobbzilla
- Nice idea, but this is not how flight planning works. The optimization algorithms that airlines use consider a broader range of variables than just fuel, since you also have cost per hour that the engine is running, cost per hour for the crew, and overflight fees for different airspaces.
And the output still has to be a valid flight plan route. You can't just file a flight plan for "I want this zig zag line at this altitude".
Commercial flight planning software does this optimization as well, but it only selects routes that are valid. For example you have to be at a certain altitude to go one way on a route and another altitude to go the other way. ATC can't do their job if you have planes pointing at each other in opposite directions doing 1000+ km/h.
by t0mas88 - not just cost-per-hour of the crew, but also rest schedules. A more economical flight-path is all well and good, but it's useless if it means that the crew will breach their permitted duty hours.by codeduck
- 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.by K0balt
- And meanwhile here I am feeling guilty when I eat a cheeseburger.by fahrvrgnugen
- I just had this happen on a flight yesterday. Exactly as you describe, extra fuel put the plane over weight, so we sat there letting it burn for an hour.by grahamburger
- This is sad to hear! Early in my career I worked for a company making airport collaborative decision making (A-CDM) software. One of the most impactful projects to which I contributed was a model that calculated the exact right moment for a pilot to turn their engine on given likely pushback times etc. That saved quite a lot of fuel (and therefore cost and pollution) back in the day. It's a real shame if similar thinking isn't being applied to the problem you describe.by thom
- It's unfortunate the fuel can't be siphoned back out and used. I wonder why that is; I suspect if it were possible, it'd be happening.
Also worth noting, tangentially, though - the reason planes are fueled as they are is because if you run out of fuel in a car, you're just stranded. In an airplane, you're quite possibly dead. If you only load the plane with exactly as much fuel as it needs to get to its destination, you run the risk of not having enough to safely divert.
On the other hand, planes also have maximum landing weights, so a plane which must divert or land in an emergency often has to dump fuel for a while first. That's more unusual and not something you can easily plan for, but it's part of the problem too.
by ivraatiems - Aviation is notoriously resistant to change. For both good and bad reasons. Look at how long it's taken to get leaded fuel on the way out for light aircraft operations.
It seems like there should be a solution to this though, either battery-electric or fuel-cell auxiliary thrust for ground operations and taxiing, or utilising tractors more to do the full aircraft ground movement, not just pushing back from the gate. Unfortunately it's impossible to suggest such changes without getting a horde of aviation nerds thinking of reasons to tell you why something isn't possible, instead of imagining how it _could_ be possible.
So it's exciting to see companies like Heart Aerospace innovating in this area.
by lukeify - 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?
by buildsjets - username checks out!
- The newest stuff is integrating with maintenance records so that things are timed really nicely.
- I don't like to be that guy, but this doesn't read as a particularly well thought-through experiment... I don't think it's as effective an advertisement for OP's consulting as they may have thought, because it suggests an inability to think within relevant context.
The truth is that given the legal and ethical constraints available, routing is already relatively well-optimized in many places. (There are some places, like China's hybrid civilian-military airspace, where those constraints are extremely nasty and basically make the problem impossible to solve better than it is.)
Aviation tries to solve the fuel consumption problem by designing planes to use less fuel, rather than by flying more optimal routes. There is a massive effort in aviation pretty much all the time to try to use less fuel, for every reason from cost to environmental impact to the relative accessibility of jet fuel now and into the future. It's the reason engines have gotten physically larger; it's a big part of why we don't use supersonic jets anymore as well.
The efforts have been pretty sucessful: https://theicct.org/maximizing-aircraft-fuel-efficiency-desi...
There's no hubris in identifying a problem, and fairly little in thinking you might be able to help solve it, but there's a good bit in imagining nobody else has done it.
by ivraatiems - I find your comment unnecessarily harsh. I don't see a claim that the open source solution is better or a good solution for actual production use by airlines - it reads to me as a "here's how to use what's openly available" blog post.
(Also, Scikit-decide seems to be on the Github account of Airbus, so I assume they have at least some basic knowledge of how aviation works.)