Our group decided to calculate the energy consumption of the average American due to plane travel a little differently than McKay. McKay just took into account the consumption of passengers aboard one international flight per year. What about domestic flights? What about people that don't travel on airlines as much? We believe our method provides a broader description of energy consumption than McKay does.
First, the Bureau of Transportation Services reports the annual available seat miles in the US to be 1,007,681,355 miles. Also, from a thermo book, 1 gallon of Kerosene (jet fuel) = 39.58 kWh.
We also assumed a full 747 for all flights in our calculations (a pretty broad assumption, this probably skewed our values a bit). Using the fuel capacity values and range from the McKay book, the jet fuel economy is 7.204 gal/mile.
so... 7.2 gal/mile * 39.58 kWh/gal = 285.13 kWh/mile
285 kWh/mile * 1,007,681,355 miles = 2.9e^11 kWh used per year.
Assuming 300 million people in the US.....
2.9e^11/3e^8 = 958 kWh/year/person or 2.6 kWh/day/person
Since we are trying to find the average footprint by an American, we feel this method provides a better picture than the McKay method. The energy consumption per person is significantly lower because we didn't account for international flights. Also, people that never fly are included in this calculation, which will lower the average.
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