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Saving fuel secures future – one gallon at a time

  • Published
  • By Lt. Gen. Robert R. Allardice
  • Vice Commander, Air Mobility Command
SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. --  Maintainers, aircrew members and aerial porters are changing the course of Air Mobility Command's future.

AMC is the Defense Department's largest aviation fuel consumer. Avoiding fuel waste is one of our greatest opportunities to help the DOD continue the mission within a constrained budget. If we don't meet budget reduction requirements by sparing excess fuel, then we'll have to find savings elsewhere.

To this end, our aerial porters, maintainers and aircrews are empowering the future mobility mission. Every day around the world, they implement new, more fuel-efficient ways of doing business: from loading cargo more precisely and removing excess aircraft equipment to flying more direct routes to destinations.

Airmen may question how saving a few hundred pounds of fuel on a mission can matter. While some fuel-efficiency initiatives may appear tedious at times and possibly create an additional workload, collectively they make a tremendous impact.

Let me highlight just a few examples of how the savings quickly add up:

· Mission Index Flying uses in-flight software to calculate the most fuel-efficient flight profile to operate a mission. For example, flying a C-17 Globemaster III from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., at .74 mach instead of .78 saves 5,359 pounds of fuel and the government $3,131, while only adding 25 minutes to the entire sortie.

· The Precise Cargo Loading system considers each airframe for maximum load potential. If every pallet delivered in Fiscal Year 2011 were increased by 100 pounds, it would eliminate one entire sortie per day - saving nearly $8 million in excess fuel costs.

· Aircraft Power Unit use time is money. The C-5 Galaxy, C-17 and KC-10 Extender aircraft operated approximately 76,609 sorties in FY11. Reducing APU use on each of these sorties by 1.5 hours could save nearly $700,000 per month.

If you are part of the team making these and other fuel-efficiency initiatives a reality at your base, I want to thank you. You're doing a wonderful job. The importance of your work to prevent fuel waste cannot be overemphasized.

Fuel efficiency is our future. We must be good stewards of taxpayers' money and continue to lead the way for federal government efforts to use fuel efficiently.