Why Americans can't fly as far as Europeans

It's all about girth

I just liked the picture (Credit: Anderson Mancini)

Aeroplanes are heavy¹. A typical single-aisle aircraft — think the Airbus A320 that might whisk you off to Prague for the weekend — comes in at around 45 tonnes, while the double-decker A380 averages 280 tonnes. And this is buck naked. Throw in fuel, food and those showers in Emirates’ first class and you’re looking at a maximum takeoff weight of 79 tonnes and 575 tonnes respectively. As a reminder, these things are also expected to fly.

Of course, I missed out one load-bearing piece of the jigsaw: passengers. On that Airbus A320, a standard 180 bums on seats would weigh approximately 15 tonnes, or around 20% of the maximum takeoff weight and nearly half of payload capacity. As a result, airlines and regulators pay close attention to how much passengers weigh, without generally fetching the scales at check-in. The budget travel experience entails enough ritual humiliation as is.

Iberia A320 seating map (Credit: Iberia Airlines)

This even means taking into account the weather. In winter, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) assumes that passengers ‘weigh’ 2.2 kg (5 lb) more than in summer, to accommodate all those Succession-style gilets and Canada Goose parkas. But there’s a trade-off. The greater the proportion of a plane’s maximum takeoff weight that is allocated to passengers, the less that can go to fuel, reducing the range an aircraft can travel.

And this is a bigger problem for Americans, on account of their, erm, girth.