October 24, 2002
While talking in #Everything this morning, I had mentioned my desire to take a trip to Japan, but really disliked the immense cost of a ticket. (The cheapest I found is about $1015 round-trip, coach.) In chatting with my IRC friends, I'd made an estimate of around $8k in total costs to send that plane on a 9 hour flight. I was told that it costs a LOT more to send that plane across the drink, and that I "should stop pulling numbers out of [my] ass".
So I did just that.
After spending a while doing some research, keeping the channel informed as to my progress via running tally, I actually calculated the approximate costs. Without getting into the specifics of the cost breakdowns (once was enough, thank you), my assumption was a Boeing 777 carrying 400 passengers (20 of which were business class and 8 were first class - also assuming a total of 50 children and 350 adults), fully fueled, fully insured, fully staffed by a compliment of 50, fully maintained, and fully taxed (including airport costs). For a 9 hour flight, the costs came out to $331,364. Ticket sales for the flight totaled $536,842, leaving $205,478 as the gross profit. Obviously my original $8k estimate was horribly off-base (fuel alone came to about $62k), but that's still a big chunk of change in gross profit.
Pretty interesting stuff, actually. I never would have thought that it could cost that much to send a 777 on a 9 hour flight.
(04:25)
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