Fuel Tankering - for Flygprestanda AB's flight planning system

Abstract: One of the biggest expenses for airline companies is the fuel for the aircrafts; preceded only by labor costs it is important for an airline to optimize its use of fuel. One option to save money on fuel is by doing something called Fuel Tankering. Essentially, fuel tankering is a way to lower the fuel cost by refueling at departures where the fuel price is lower than at the destination of the aircraft. It is difficult for a pilot to predict whether or not he can make a profit by tankering and if he can, how much extra fuel he should take onboard to gain the biggest profit possible. To be able to calculate whether it is possible to make some profit on fuel tankering there is a lot of variables that needs to be taken into account, such as fuel tankering amount, flight distances, velocities, winds, altitude, local fuel prices, payload and more. All these variables are available in Flygprestandas flight planning system FOCS so our task was to integrate a fuel tankering solution into FOCS that retrieves accurate fuel consumption data with different amount of extra fuel loaded and uses this to present a tankering table in the tripkit for the pilot to see how much fuel the pilot should tanker to gain the most profit (if there is any profit). The solution is integrated and fully working but certain enhancements can still be made. There are still some variables that are missing that will slightly affect the profit results, such as CO2 emission tax and different currencies. When these variables are added at a later stage our design allows these to be integrated without much difficulty.