Airlines slow down flights to save on fuel

Airlines have found something in common with consumers struggling with fuel costs: Like drivers on a highway, they can get more miles per gallon, and save money, by simply slowing down.

NEW YORK - Drivers have long known that slowing down on the highway means getting more miles to the gallon. Now airlines are trying it, too — adding a few minutes to flights to save millions on fuel.

Southwest Airlines started flying slower about two months ago, and projects it will save $42 million in fuel this year by extending each flight by one to three minutes.

On one Northwest Airlines flight from Paris to Minneapolis earlier this week alone, flying slower saved 162 gallons of fuel, saving the airline $535. It added eight minutes to the flight, extending it to eight hours, 58 minutes.

That meant flying at an average speed of 532 mph, down from the usual 542 mph.

"It's not a dramatic change," said Dave Fuller, director of flight operations at JetBlue, which began flying slower two years ago.

But the savings add up. JetBlue adds an average of just under two minutes to each flight, and saves about $13.6 million a year in jet fuel. Adding just four minutes to its flights to and from Hawaii saves Northwest Airlines $600,000 a year on those flights alone.

United Airlines has invested in flight planning software that helps pilots choose the best routes and speeds. In some cases, that means planes fly at lower speeds. United estimates the software will save it $20 million a year.

"What we're doing is flying at a more consistent speed to save fuel," said Megan McCarthy, a United spokeswoman.

United expects to pay $3.31 a gallon for fuel this year — not much less than what the average American driver pays for a gallon of unleaded at the pump. Southwest, which has an aggressive fuel hedging program, expects to pay about $2.35.

Fliers, already beleaguered by higher fares, more delays and long security lines, may not even notice the extra minutes. The extra flight time is added to published flight schedules or absorbed into the extra time already built into schedules for taxiing and traffic delays.

"If saving fuel costs me a few extra minutes out of my day, then ... my inconvenience is nothing," said Leah Nichols, a television producer who lives in San Francisco and was fresh off a flight at Newark Liberty International Airport, waiting for a train to New York. "I'm cool with that."

David Gannalo, a Phoenix financial software company executive, is more than willing to give up four minutes to help airlines cut costs.

"Anything that helps the airlines, you know, because they're going bankrupt left and right," Gannalo said. "Anything that helps them out will probably be good for the industry in the long term."

Across the board, airlines are feeling the pain of higher energy prices. For jet fuel delivered at New York Harbor, the spot price — airlines pay it when they need more fuel than they've already locked down in a contract — has jumped 73 percent in the past year, to $3.54 a gallon, according to government data.

Airlines are trying other measures as well to deal with higher fuel costs, including raising fares, adding fuel surcharges to tickets and charging extra for a second checked bag rather than a third.

It's a tough time for the airline industry. Several smaller airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in recent weeks, many citing high fuel costs. Fuel costs have also resulted in sharp first-quarter losses by some airlines.

Not every airline is taking the slowdown approach.

"We have the flying schedule to protect," said John Hotard, a spokesman for American Airlines. He said the carrier does other things to save fuel — for instance, installing small vertical stabilizers called winglets to the ends of some aircraft wings, which boosts fuel efficiency by improving aerodynamics.

American also tries to keep its planes plugged in to ground-based power and air conditioning for as long as possible to conserve fuel, and pushes air traffic controllers to assign its flights to altitudes where they will have less headwind or greater tailwind. Many other airlines have adopted similar measures.

Slowing flights down isn't a magic bullet. It can help airlines conserve fuel, but it can also lead to greater labor and maintenance costs if airline employees work longer hours and planes spend more time in service, said Bob Mann, an independent airline consultant based in Port Washington, N.Y.

And slowing down to conserve fuel can only be pushed so far: Below a certain speed — which varies depending on the plane — an aircraft's fuel usage can actually rise.

Airlines must strike a delicate balance, seeking an aircraft's "sweet spot" on fuel use without slowing down so much that other costs, and flight delays, rise, Mann said: "Everything's a tradeoff."

Consumer advocates say the extra minutes shouldn't matter.

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"If it means that airlines can keep their costs down, keep their ticket prices down, and save a little fuel, that's fine," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director at the Consumer Federation of America.

But others doubt the change will result in lower fares any more than previous cost cutting, such as eliminating meals or taking away blankets.

"I don't think so," Mann said. "When they took off the mystery meat, did they lower fares?"

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Blockade puts Gaza on brink of serious food crisis, says UN

AFP/Getty

A Palestinian father drives his family car loaded with UN aid food in Gaza City on 1 May 2008

Destitution and food insecurity among Gaza's 1.5 million residents has reached an unprecedentedly critical level, according to unpublished UN findings that they now need "urgent assistance" to avert a "serious food crisis" in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The report revealing that Gaza's population has already passed the internationally-agreed threshold at which it needs concerted measures to prevent a "deterioration in their nutrition" has been drafted on the eve of a donors' conference to discuss Palestinian political and economic prospects in London today.

Showing that Palestinians are having to spend a higher and higher share of their shrinking incomes on food, the findings are that the proportion of Gazan incomes now going on food is 66 per cent – significantly higher than the 61 per cent recorded for Somalia. Seventy per cent of Gazans are at a "deep poverty" income level of $1.20 (60p) per head per day or less.

The joint report from three UN agencies, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the refugee agency UNRWA, points out that this proportion is a "key measure of destitution" because the poorest people in the world spend most of their incomes on food while the richest spend relatively little compared with spending on accommodation, healthcare transport and clothes.

The findings show that levels – which are the highest in the Middle East and reaching 73 per cent among the poorest sectors in Gaza – are not far behind in the West Bank at 58 per cent and that Palestinians in general are "extremely vulnerable" to the recent steep rise in world food prices as well as local factors driven by the Israeli-imposed economic blockade of Gaza.

The report says that half of Gaza's population bought food on credit between January and March 2008 and that one third stopped paying utility bills but that "credit lines are running out". It says that with two thirds of the poorest Palestinians having decreased their expenditure on food "many people are buying lower quality cheaper foods and reducing their consumption of fresh fruit, vegetable and animal protein to save money and also reducing their portion sizes".

Despite the continuing shipment by the Israeli authorities of essential humanitarian goods – including basic food supplies – into Gaza and two to three-monthly food aid distribution to over a million people by UNRWA and the WFP, the report says that global food and fuel price rises, along with specific obstacles faced by the territories now present an "enormous challenge". It adds that "targeted food aid and livelihood support interventions are imperative".

The growing emergency comes on top of the devastation of Gaza's economy by the nine-month closure of crossings to commercial exports and imports, growing fuel shortages, and a warning by John Ging, UNWRA's director of operations in Gaza, to British MPs on Wednesday that it was on the point of an "explosion" which could lead to a repeat of a breakout from the territory.

In Jerusalem the WFP's Kirstie Campbell said the budget for the next two years of food distribution to the Palestinian territories would cost $50m more than planned.

The WFP has already cut a food aid programme to 130,000 farmers in Gaza designed to stop them selling land and other assets as a result of not being able to send out fruit, vegetable and flower exports because of the blockade.

Ms Campbell said last night: "At the moment we are less and less able to assist what is a growing need. Hunger today is widespread in Gaza on the ground and it will not be long before we face a growing problem of malnutrition in Gaza."

Kemal Ajour, whose family's four bakeries in Gaza were forced to shut this week because of a shortage of cooking gas, said overall bread consumption was as much as 40 per cent down on the the period before the first Hamas assumption of office in 2006 and subsequent blockade. Mr Ajour, who employs around 80 workers in the bakeries, said he did not believe his angry and frustrated customers were starving but added: "These actions are not hurting Hamas, which is getting what it needs. They are hurting the ordinary people here."

Fuel distributors in Gaza – whom Israel has accused of deliberately exacerbating serious shortages of diesel and petrol that have severely reduced traffic and created a growing threat of overflowing sewage in Gaza by refusing to distribute existing fuel stocks – said yesterday that they had now emptied the fuel tanks of existing stocks and claimed that it was now up to Israel to replenish them.

The distributors' deputy chairman, Mahmoud Azundar, said that a committee made up of distributors would be meeting over the next few days to allocate priorities of the stocks, which were now in tanks round Gaza, and which he said contained fuel dramatically below what Gaza needed.

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15th-century shipwreck laden with treasure found

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins -- and cannons to fend off pirates lurking off Africa some five centuries ago.

An archaeologist displays shipwreck loot: a Spanish gold coin, three Portuguese silver coins and brass dividers.

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It had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable coast. It sank, only to be found last month by men seeking other treasure.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist Dieter Noli, who is researching the ship's origins, said in an interview Thursday, describing De Beers geologists stumbling on the wreck April 1 as they prospected for diamonds off Namibia's southwest coast.

Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture of the government of Namibia and De Beers, had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so geologists could work.

Noli said one of the geologists first saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then they found what looked like cannon barrels, but weren't sure.

The geologists stopped the brutal earth-moving work of searching for diamonds and sent photos to Noli, who had done research in the Namibian desert since his university days in Cape Town in the mid-1980s and since 1996 has advised De Beers on the archaeological impact of its operations in Namibia.

The find "was what I'd been waiting for for 20 years," Noli said. "Understandably, I was pretty excited. I still am."

Noli's original specialty was the desert, but because of Namdeb's offshore explorations, he had been preparing for the possibility of a wreck, even learning to dive.

He had also studied maritime artifacts with an expert from his university days, Bruno Werz, whom he has brought in to help research the Namdeb wreck.

Judging from the notables depicted on the hoard of Spanish and Portuguese coins and the type of cannons and crude navigational equipment, the ship went down in the late 1400s or early 1500s, around the time Vasco de Gama and Columbus were plying the waters of the New World, "a period when Africa was just being opened up, when the whole world was being opened up," Noli said.

Noli compared the remnants found -- the ingots, ivory, coins, coffin-sized timber fragments -- to evidence at a crime scene.

"The surf would have pounded that wreck to smithereens," he said. "It's not like `Pirates of the Caribbean,' with a ship more or less intact."

He and Werz are trying to fit the pieces into a story. They divide their time between inventorying the find in Namibia and researching in museums and libraries in Cape Town in neighboring South Africa, from where Noli spoke by phone Thursday.

Eventually, they will go to Portugal, whose ships were particularly active in the area 500 years ago, or Spain to search for records of a vessel with similar cargo that went missing.

"You don't turn a skipper loose with a cargo of that value and have no record of it," Noli said.

The wealth aboard is intriguing. Noli said the large amount of copper could mean the ship had been sent by a government looking for material to build cannons. Trade in ivory was usually controlled by royal families, another indication the ship was on official business.

On the other hand, why was the captain still holding so many coins? Shouldn't they have been traded for the ivory and copper?

"Either he did a very, very good deal. Or he was a pirate," Noli said. "I'm convinced we'll find out what the ship was and who the captain was."

What sent her down may remain a mystery. But Noli has theories, noting the stretch of coast where it met its fate was notorious for fierce storms and disorienting fogs. In later years, sailors with sophisticated navigational tools avoided it. The only tools found aboard Noli's wrecks were astrolabes, which can be used to determine only how far north or south you have sailed.

"Sending a ship toward Africa in that period, that was venture capital in the extreme," Noli said. "These chaps were very much on the edge as far as navigation. It was still very difficult for them to know where they were."

Noli has found signs worms were at work on his ship's timber, and sheets of lead used to patch holes, indications the ship was old when it set out on its last voyage.

Imagine a leaky, overladen ship caught in a storm. The copper ingots, shaped like sections of a sphere, would have sat snug. But the tusks -- some 50 have been found -- could have shifted, tipping the ship.

"And down you go," Noli said, "weighed down by your treasure."

Spanish gold coins, Portuguese silver coins minted in the late 1400s or early 1500s were found, as well as dividers used for measuring distance on a map during navigation.

The reverse of the some of the gold coins depicts Ferdinand and Isabella, two Spanish monarchs of the time.
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