Maximum range of 3060

[adaoernesto 0]

When it comes to maximum range of 3060 NM, this is considered full pax and fuel reserves, I think with a low cost index can go far beyond this with the PMDG, more than 8 hours of flight. Is that right?

[Paul Deemer 13]

No its not going to go far beyond 8 hours. The longest Flight I have done was from Male Atolls in the Indian Ocean to Perth Austrailia at 8 hours and 18 minutes and I was not full of pax. Although I was at Max Take Off Weight with 46,000 lbs fuel and whatever pax I had at the time that brough the MTOW to 174,000 lbs. If your using the 2 class layout and fill it up with 162,000 lbs you can only put in 43,000 lbs fuel or you will be over MTOW weight and the numbers will change to yellow to warn you. I have done Boston to Dublin and still had a 10,000 lbs reserve. That is about a 6.5 hour flight. The one I did from VRMM to YPPH was pushing it to the extreme. I only had about 3,000 lbs left when I got there.

[Chock 17,769]

Yes, you are right, although you might not be able to fly a huge distance. Maximum range as a book figure for airliners is a number which cannot really be viewed as cast in stone, nor in isolation. When airliners are first proposed to airlines by an aircraft manufacturer, the airlines will say stuff like ''we want a single-aisle narrow body airliner which can fly 200,000lbs of payload 2,500 miles' or whatever, and so an aircraft manufacturer will then attempt to design an aircraft which can comfortably make such a trip, plus have a 45 minute fuel reserve. But most of the determining factor for how far an aircraft can fly is not so much the fuel capacity alone, as the MTOW and how much fuel it will burn off climbing up to cruise altitude when at that weight, so there is always a trade off between useful load and range. A classic case of where that went horribly wrong for an aircraft maker, was the McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) MD-11, which was projected to be the ideal aircraft for many airlines flying trans-Pacific flights, in terms of range and payload plus three-engine safety. But the engines developed for it by Pratt and Whitney, General Electric and Rolls Royce (the RR ones never actually being ordered by any airline) were all way more thirsty on fuel than had been promised by the engine companies when MD got them, and that left MD trying to sell an aircraft that could only be used on those trans-Pacific routes if it either flew shorter sectors, or carried less passengers, which meant it was nowhere near as suitable as the aircraft MD had promised they were going to deliver even though that was not really their fault. MD did eventually get the MD-11 to fly more economically by use of several modifications which cleaned up the airframe and reduced drag, and the engine makers also improved the performance of the engines, but by the time they did that, the A340 and the B777 were available, which is why the MD-11 is still used, but is now largely a freight aircraft, because all the airlines that bought it as a passenger plane found something which performed better than it and sold theirs off as soon as they could, with freight companies picking them up cheap as a result of that. Al