The '66 Fury weighs in at 3500 pounds and got about 10-12 miles per gallon based on my pump-to-pump odometer tests.
The Piper Cherokee PA-28-140 weighs a petite 2150 pounds (max loaded weight) and burns 10 gallons an hour and would do about 115 KIAS, which translated to roughly 130 miles per hour ground speed, which is 13 miles per gallon.
It would do even better if you flew for efficiency, but since rental was by hours of engine time wet (I didn't pay for fuel and would be reimbursed for fuel purchased), there was really no reason to not throttle that baby up to full rental power.
> Wow, that’s a hilarious stat. How is that even… possible?
There's nothing magical about flight. Take-off takes a bunch of energy. Maintaining that energy, not so much. Planes are pretty aerodynamic, imagine that :) Some are much lighter than cars since every pound counts. To the point that people often opt to not have AC (if it's even an option) to save a few pounds.
They will cover a lot of ground in the same amount of time. That helps even more.
Not all planes are that economical, of course. But some are indeed hilarious. Check ultralights (or microlights as they are known in Europe).
A/C is amusing because it’s only needed on the ground - once you’re at cruise you can just open the window if it’s too hot - the outside air temp will almost always be pretty Low.
>There's nothing magical about flight. Take-off takes a bunch of energy. Maintaining that energy, not so much.
Yep, take-off and ascent burns a lot of fuel, much more for the time duration than cruising. It's too bad there isn't a way of recovering some of that energy when descending, similar to how electric cars recover energy when braking.
> It's too bad there isn't a way of recovering some of that energy when descending, similar to how electric cars recover energy when braking.
A descent is a pretty efficient conversion between potential energy (altitude) and kinetic energy (speed/horizontal distance) so you get it back. Your RPM difference between cruise and descent is a proxy for your recovered energy. An engine out glide/landing is the extreme demonstration of this.
That’s not an issue. My typical cruise descent profile on a VFR flight is to roll in a small amount of nose down trim and fly at full cruise power around 300 feet per minute for most of the descent, using the stored potential energy to increase speed.
Nearer the airport, I’ll make a power reduction and continue to convert that potential energy to forward travel, eventually putting out gear and flaps.
There’s more than enough drag for any reasonable descent profile to allow the potential energy to be used to move forward without gathering excessive speed.
Power off, I can glide around 1.5 nautical mile for every 1000’ of elevation I have to use.
All kinds of planes have by necessity far better drag coefficients than cars. A truck, SUV, even a minicar is like a brick wall moving at high speeds while a plane essentially slices through the air like a knife.
Additionally, planes tend to fly at constant and pretty high speed for most of their operation, while a car has a lot of acceleration and deceleration going on. Planes can also use wind thermals to change altitude (sail planes can only use that!) or can stay at the same altitude while a car driving below it is stuck with the geography (i.e. it has to follow and climb hills).
