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November 02, 2013

flying: A dollar a gallon

What if a local gas station started to sell a gas for one dollar per gallon? The traffic jam would be huge, don't you think? AvWeb reports on the aftermath of the Redbird Skyport experiment:

Redbird’s San Marcos, Texas, Skyport made quite a splash earlier in October when it sold avgas for two weeks at a buck a gallon. Yet two weeks after the cheap gas experiment ended, flight activity is still up threefold at the airport, according to Redbird CEO Jerry Gregoire. [...]

"We’re glad to say the demand is out there to fly. It surprised us quite a bit. We expected in the first two weeks to sell about 16,000 gallons where we would have normally sold about 2000 gallons in that period of time. We ended up selling 90,000 gallons," [...]

"Now what we’re seeing after this is that the amount of flying into this airport and the flights scheduled into this area are up about threefold on a daily basis since that promotion ended,” Gregoire said.

In exchange for gas at a dollar a gallon, Redbird interviewed more that 1600 pilots flying in a total of about 1000 airplanes [...] Pilots were asked about how much they fly, where they fly and what type of flight they typically make. Interestingly, almost a quarter — 23 percent — said they hadn’t flown in at least a year before the cheap fuel became available.

I'm sure this will add ammo to people who claim that aviating always was too expensive and there's nothing new to it. Unfortunately, a 3-fold increase in traffic still puts us a half again below the levels of 1980s, when the population was only 280 million.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 02:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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