How much does fuel cost per airline ticket?

Some eye opening stats. I’m guessing that the $150 OAK-JFK tickets I bought in 2002 won’t be happening again.

The Middle Seat - WSJ.com

Airlines don’t release profitability data about specific routes, but they do have to report lots of operational information to the government. JetBlue, for example, said in its government reports that its A320s burn an average of 771 gallons of fuel an hour, so the total fuel bill for a JFK-Long Beach round-trip comes to more than $35,000 at $4 a gallon for jet fuel, the price when oil is at about $135 a barrel. Spread that over the average load of passengers for JetBlue, and the fuel cost for each passenger comes to $292 round-trip. A JetBlue spokesman confirms that those numbers are close to the airline’s current results.

That’s plenty steep when you consider JetBlue’s average fare in the fourth quarter was $376 round-trip on the JFK-Long Beach route, not counting taxes and government fees. Fares today are higher, but the fuel bill per passenger is about $140 higher round-trip than last year, and fares haven’t gone up that much.

In the future, some day we’ll be talking about “Remember those days when we could fly to London?”