Saving Jet Fuel

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have this for sailboat routing: https://leebow.dev/research/how-the-race-to-hawaii-is-won. It solves the optimal route for every Transpac and Pac Cup start since 2011, using each race's own verified wind data (ERA5). Then it compares that route to what the fleet actually sailed. It shows the median hours the fleet gave up, how often the optimal route even falls inside the fleet's own spread (16% of the time), and how much that pattern holds from year to year. A second figure runs the same solve across 108 routes over 70 years, so you can see how much the optimal route itself varies, not just one good example.

One difference from the OpenAP/scikit-decide setup: my router doesn't search a fixed grid with A*. It runs a continuous isochrone search that expands a fan of headings against the live forecast each step. That's closer to how routing is actually done for this problem, and it's what both the live product and the backtest above use.

If you said automated instead of AI that would make sense to me.

But why would you want to use AI to control planes?

Which are these "human processes in the loop"? We are talking about changing flight schedules, and I'm pretty sure that existing flight schedules are not developed by teams of people with pen and paper, but rather by powerful ILP solvers, because of (a) the immense value in optimising every aspect of them and (b) the myriad regulatory constraints that need to be met for, e.g., flight crew scheduling.

Aviation is one of the few industries where the largest regular (non-capital) expense is something other than labour, namely fuel. Anything that reduces fuel costs even a little is of obvious interest to every airline.

There are still the issues of coordinating flight paths to avoid collisions, and regulation (including international regulation). The former seems like a technical problem amenable to increasingly accurate approximations over time. I don't know about the latter, but I doubt it's as insurmountable as you imply. International air travel has been around longer than ILP solvers, meaning that at some point flight schedules were created by people. Now they're created by ILP solvers, and the regulatory environment successfully adapted to that change.