The Steamboating Forum

Before the party starts and the wine is flowing, a quick look at this:

The Airbus A320, 6400 US Gal fuel, 511 MPH, 3100 Mile Range, with 150 passengers. That comes out at 0.48 MPG, but effectively 72 MPG per passenger, or about 18 MPG for four passengers. However on a short haul the MPG numbers would reduce somewhat.

Now for the Rose Hull Steamer, quite impossible to know its power with no displacement, and although we know the RPM (300), what might be the propeller pitch??? So assuming some numbers, 5 MPH, 4 passengers (crowded in a Rose hull, but not as crowded as the Airbus), using 0.75 horsepower with a steam plant conversion efficiency of 0.025 (2-1/ 2 percent), we have 0.59 US Gal per hour (0.49 Imp Gal per hour), thus getting 8.5 MPG (US) with the four passengers aboard.

So, in one hour's travel of the Airbus, they burn about 1000 US Gallons fuel, enough to run the Rose about 1800 hours, or 9000 miles.

Well done Fred!

Thanks for the elegant answer and appropriate picture. I'm afraid that I was too lazy to finish off the sums myself. The MPG per passenger figure are interesting espcially as, I guess, that is for full capacity.

Regards

Pete

72 MPG??? Thats more than twice as good as my car, perhaps I should start flying more.

A data point from a friend of mine who flew 747's for United for many a moon.

We were talking on ham radio between my house and his airplane as he was coming across the North Pacific with close to 500 people on board counting employees. We did the arithmetic for m.p.g. per person based on the total consumption from loading gate to loading gate. It came out rather close to 30 m.p.g. per person.

Mike