Trimess

Monday, May 16, 2011

How Fuel-efficient Is the Pentagon? Military’s Oil Addiction

A B-52 bomber gulps down 86 barrels per hour. F-4 Phantom fighter/bombers devour 40 barrels per hour. At peak thrust, F-15 fighters burn 25 gallons per minute. An F-16 jet on a training mission ignites more fuel in a single hour than the average car owner consumes in two years.

To reach supersonic speeds, a pilot turns on the plane’s afterburners which can triple a jet’s speed and increase fuel consumption twenty times. With its afterburner kicked in, Cutler states, the "relatively fuel-efficient" F-15 fighter torches fuel at the astounding rate of four gallons per second — 14,400 gallons per hour. And as the military opts for bigger, faster, more sophisticated weapons, fuel efficiency continues to plummet
http://http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?itemid=593

1 comment:

jeff a. said...

The military is the single biggest consumer of oil in the country. The Iraq War, which according to Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz will end up costing $3 trillion, is/was all about oil(It was originally called Operation Iraqi Liberation(O.I.L) before they decided that might be a little to much of a tip-off). Can you say Oil-Military Industrial Complex? Because this is what we have and this is what is bankrupting us economically,educationally, and environmentally (not to even mention morally).