Fuel Efficiency Trends for New Commercial Jet Aircraft: 1960 to 2014

In 2009, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) released a report analyzing trends in new aircraft fuel efficiency from 1960 to 2008 for the 10 largest commercial aircraft manufacturers. The report — the first of its kind to include smaller aircraft types, such as regional jets, and to adopt sales and activity weighting among different types — found that the fuel efficiency of commercial jet aircraft approximately doubled from 1960 to 2008 on both a fuel/passenger-mile and fuel/ton-mile basis. The report also found that the rate of fuel efficiency improvement fluctuated substantially. It identified decades in which the average fuel burn of new aircraft fell by 3% or more annually (1960s and 1980s) and decades where virtually no gains in fuel efficiency were seen (1970s and 2000s). The study explored the drivers of the slowdown in fuel efficiency after 1990, linking them to a lack of new, more efficient aircraft types and the increasing prevalence of regional jets, which are in general less fuel-efficient than larger jet aircraft. This white paper refines and extends the 2009 study to include all commercial jet aircraft deliveries for the full period of 1960 to 2014. While the 2009 study focused on aircraft performance at a single range and payload design point, in practice aircraft are flown carrying different payloads over different ranges. This updated study attempts to capture these variations and make an apples-to-apples comparison between two analyzed metrics: block fuel per passenger-kilometer for representative aircraft operations, and a cruise fuel metric based on the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO's) CO₂ certification procedure. Additional refinements in the study included expanding the analysis from the 10 largest manufacturers (2009) to the 20 largest, and the modeling of fuel burn based on standardized seating configurations to distinguish changes in fuel efficiency due to aircraft technology/design from those driven by operational parameters controlled by airlines, not manufacturers.