This is the perfect route planning software if you are the only aircraft in the sky, and fuel is your only cost. The commercial solutions exist because they consider not only the winds and fuel costs in their optimization, but also known previously cleared ATC routings, altitude restrictions whether they are charted or only documented by letter-of-agreement, expected delays due to historical congestion, pilot and cabin crew pay, crew duty time limits (your more fuel efficient route may take longer and require an entire second crew), contracted lease, finance, insurance, and maintenance rates as these are also frequently paid by the the hour, and airport arrival curfew times. And probably a few more things too.

Also, you say nothing about incorporating ETOPS routing requirements into your application, and looking at the opentop source neither does it, therefore I assume this must mean this is the first time you have seen that acronym and therefore do not understand its criticality in determining aircraft routing. Might want to have your AI agent read this Wikipedia article, because your application generates many routes that are not legal to fly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS

Should I even ask if this application routes around areas that have been declared active war zones by NOTAM?

I have a close family member who flys airliners. He routinely laments having to burn up thousands of pounds of fuel on the ramp to adjust changes to the landing weight projections by dispatch and from over fueling. The amount of waste in a single error (and they are not that infrequent) is enough to heat my house for a year… and I live within 200 miles of the arctic circle. I mean, burning 1000 gallons of fancy diesel once in a while is a rounding error for jetliner operations, but still, it’s absurd that that is the best solution.

Nice idea, but this is not how flight planning works. The optimization algorithms that airlines use consider a broader range of variables than just fuel, since you also have cost per hour that the engine is running, cost per hour for the crew, and overflight fees for different airspaces.

And the output still has to be a valid flight plan route. You can't just file a flight plan for "I want this zig zag line at this altitude".

Commercial flight planning software does this optimization as well, but it only selects routes that are valid. For example you have to be at a certain altitude to go one way on a route and another altitude to go the other way. ATC can't do their job if you have planes pointing at each other in opposite directions doing 1000+ km/h.

If you look at the "optimal" path here looks completely unrealistic/pathological. How is it optimal to zig zag like this? The grid is clearly too coarse and that's possibly not the only issue: https://tech.marksblogg.com/theme/images/flight_planning/msr...

and this would work in real life too, if only we could all climb and descend entirely at pilot's discretion, direct enter enter and never have to worry about all of the other planes doing the exact same thing.

A bit tangential but allow me to share an interesting anecdote.

My MSc dissertation was on accounting for aeroplane fuel emission... during research I discovered an interesting fact; because of how the EU ETS (airline emissions regulations) works, (fuel consumption acts as a proxy for emissions) you can technically end up with less ETS penalty by adding a stop just before entering the EU.

You see the penalty applies for the entire flight and not the portion over EU airspace... so you just have to condense the flight instead. So add a stop just before adding EU, and now you have two flights instead of one, and that second flight has lower 'emission' even though the entire trip was longer, and more importantly the extra stops's landing and take off increases fuel expenditure and thus emissions!

Gives you some perspective on how legislation to reduce fuel usage and emissions can act counter to its stated goals.

____

    > https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jate/vol2/iss2/3/

    > Another way to reduce the EU ETS charges is to change the route so that the last leg of the flight into or out of the EU is shorter than the current non-stop route. Changing routes to include an additional stop reduces the amount of fuel used for flight segments into and out of the EU, and therefore reduces EU ETS charges because the charges are based on fuel consumption during the entire flight, not just the portion over EU. A major US-based cargo carrier, UPS Airlines, considered adding stops to reduce the EU ETS charges (Cameron & Michaels, 2011). Instead of flying non-stop from between hubs in Hong Kong and Cologne, Germany, the route would be changed by adding a stop in Mumbai, India. While UPS estimates that the route change reduces the ETS charge by 25%, UPS also estimates that the emissions are increased by 33% due to the longer route and added takeoff and landing.

Grepped TFA for "IFR", "NOTAM", "oceanic", "RVSM", "ETOPS", and "TFR". No results -> no point reading any further -- might as well ask my cat to opine on neurosurgery.

- a pilot

There's a bunch of other interesting flight path optimization work going on at https://contrails.org/.

It turns out contrails contribute to 2% of global warming power and is relatively easily avoided. The cost might be a bit more fuel consumption though.

I am not sure how this approach would integrate with the common use of navigating between known/mapped IFR navigation waypoints:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=IFR+navig...

https://skybrary.aero/articles/waypoint

https://www.flyingmag.com/how-ifr-fixes-get-their-names/

Hi author, where did the aircraft and engine data come from?

That data looks to be rather arbitrary. Real aircraft performance is hugely dependent on aircraft weight, altitude, and ambient (air) temperature. And engine performance is very dependent on air temperature and airspeed. So your table of cruise/climb speeds etc might produce interesting results but the results are not going to be at all realistic.

To give you an idea of data complexity, all airliners come with hundreds or thousands of pages of closely printed tables giving performance at specified weight, temperature, altitude, etc.

We shouldn't just try to save jet fuel, we should also try to avoid contrails -- only about 5% of flights generate them, but they cause roughly half of the global warming caused by flights in general. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qBPwloCdRKw

This is highly impractical and it is evident that the author has no idea how IFR navigation and oceanic routes work. When flying on oceanic routes and even on land, you have to intercept certain waypoints and vectored into/around airspaces.

I hate to be discouraging, but maybe the author should make an attempt to understand navigation before cooking up something like this.

A plot of a larger sample of post-hoc known wind and other constraints over a regular service would help enormously to sell the idea.

One point at 45min faster and 25% less fuel is of course huge, but how does it map out over a year of routing?

Is it worthwhile para-droping or glide-dropping excess fuel within airport open grounds reserved for that purpose.

I understand that floating into the main theatre will be a serious problem. Current weather should allow making those calls.

There's also the aspect of saving money by purchasing fuel where it's cheap and having internal fuel reserves low enough at such airports so that it can be bought in significant quantities.

As you can see from my comments, I am a complete newbie, just a curious one.

The amount of downright hostile comments is insane. HN moment, I guess.

Guys, I don't think he said "all the airlines need to drop what they're doing and start using my model". He's clearly just playing around with some rudimentary simulations for fun. Did we forget that we can do things on computers for fun?

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Good exercise but as useful as Google maps would implement "ignore traffic rules" option to save fuel.

This is pretty cool! https://github.com/airbus/scikit-decide

It's nice to see the scikit brand live on.

Stop pretending corporate travel is essential.

Anyone down to vibe code a competitor to ForeFlight?

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It will never work because you have too many human processes in the loop. This HN share by the author is selling the idea of consulting to obtain nominal efficiency on a well established process to human organizations who are structurally opposed to it, subject to human regulators who are structurally opposed to it, in an industry that is famous for aversion to change. Nice try drumming up clients, but realistically you're not going to move the mountain a millimeter on this one. Quicker to wait for AI airports, AI ATC and AI airlines than selling to humans at this point. 20th century humanity just about spitballed together a working system, but making it efficient is not going to happen on our watch. We would do well to admit it.