IRL, Qantas will be speeding up A380 replacement with 787s and A350s due to high fuel prices. Unlike, say the Gulf countries, Australian airlines don’t have access to cheap fuel. And some countries have it even worse - such as the Philippines where they cancelled flights altogether to save the country’s dwindling fuel supplies.
Airfare prices IRL also spiked in response to the high fuel prices. Meanwhile, some airlines engage in fuel price hedging, and in the case of Delta Airlines, invested in its own oil refinery to save on fuel prices.
Perhaps this could be implemented? Cheap fuel is a reason why the cities of the Persian Gulf have been able to create routings to the rest of the world, and have luxurious airlines to boot (and if not for an ongoing war, they’d be popular stopover destinations).
While we do have fuel hedging on the roadmap, I wouldn’t go so far and let airlines operate refineries ![]()
But concerning your other points: What you’re suggesting is that different countries should (optionally) have different fuel prices?
Yes, although that would probably give an unfair advantage to the Gulf Countries, just like what happens IRL.
Actually while we’re speaking of fuel prices I’ve been meaning to ask for awhile but keep forgetting
Where do we get our fuel price data from?
I know u can look at any JetA1 live chart & get a rough idea of potential correlations & trends but its not quite the same. I didn’t know if we use a data source that we can also search up.
I find that usually its not too much of a problem cause the system usually works pretty well on a weekly 7 day basis. Since you can see in your fuel expenditures that the fuel prices have gone up but I’ve found that the data on the main fuel price overview page sometimes almost takes two weeks to provide the previous weeks’ data.
Our source of raw values is this one: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/EER_EPJK_PF4_RGC_DPGD.htm
Every Tuesday, I take the most recent value they provide, which is from the previous week.
But for a while now, I apply a more or less arbitrary (as in: based on my gut feeling) dampening factor to take off the edges. This could very well be replaced by
- a data feed without dampening,
- a completely artificial curve akin to the AGEX or
- the real values but consistently dampened around a base line, so it follows the movement of the real data, but not its amplitude.
Regional data are a different topic, I guess.
This is such a ‘sticky’ thing
As soon as fuel prices go regional - the first request after will be tankering