Airliners.net

Random question of the night:

How much would it cost, operationally, for an airline to cover, say, the cost of a 737-700 to go-around? How about a 747? Or a DHC8-200 on the other side of the spectrum? Suppose weather is VFR, and the aircraft is just vectored back around the airport, not having to do a full missed approach and what not.

Also how many go-arounds does the average airline go through in ,say, a week,month, or year?

Thanks   

Quoting FLY2HMO (Thread starter): How much would it cost, operationally, for an airline to cover, say, the cost of a 737-700 to go-around?

That is probably a very wide spectrum in costs associated! Time, fuel, spooling the engines back up for another cycle, and then if there are any misconnects, pretty costly for sure.....someone will surely give you a good answer.

As for how many go-arounds, might be a direct result of the amount of traffic and time of day they arrive at airports. Meaning, if they are not flying into hubs during banks they may miss the chance, or if they are not at an airport that uses the same runways to land as take-off the numbers would be much lower than say a place that uses arrivals/departures on the same piece of concrete.

Remember also, that whatever the costs may be, they are surely far cheaper than the cleanup after you hit something ...

 

- litz

On average, it costs about 62USD a minute for any delays. That figure only includes fuel, maintenance, personnel, and other direct costs, not things like missed connections, etc. I'm not sure if this is for just idling engines or full power, but in any case, its expensive if you have 3 minutes for a go-around and have say, 10 a day. I got the figure from here

ATCme   

A 747 will use approx 400kg doing an overshoot and about 7500kg of fuel in a 30minute hold. So for a typical missed approach, and return for landing instrument approach you are probably looking at about 5000 kg of fuel...
airlines usually get it for about US$2 p/gallon so approx US$0.50 per kg giving a total of US$3750...not cheap! Thats not counting any fee's (airspace, airport, rebooking pax, wages etc).