Ryanair Fuel Saving?

ian_m

I flew a return flight to Stansted this week with Ryanair and noticed the front six rows were empty. The cabin staff were not allowing passengers to sit in these seats.

Why is this? Ive heard that the aircraft uses less fuel when the front of the aircraft is lighter. Is this true or just a myth?

Jakey

I never heard of the fuel saving thing but it could've been due to weight and balance calculcations on the plane, was the flight fairly empty?

FlutterinBantam

Probably a weight and balance issue as presumably it was a relatively small passenger load and very little in the holds.

As FR do free seating ,presumably the c of g would be based on a cabin spread rather than an actual seat row spread, and as presumably a light 738 tend to be nose heavy hence the need to restrict the most fwd rows.

I 'm only guessing now, but that looks like the reason.

robinph

I've seen them blocking off the front few rows quite often, it must be something to do with squezing people into the rear of the plane for balance.

highlydebased

For C of G reasons. And also, if they are disabled persons flying, those seats are reserved for them, as they would board last.

tbh

"C of G" ??

Ghost Train

centre of gravity

ErinGoBrath

I was also told this was to save on fuel. They also do this with the back seats on the plane too.

FrCrilly

FlutterinBantam wrote:

As FR do free seating.

Apologies for going off topic, but I've seen FR being used for Ryanair on Boards a few times. Does the "F" stand for a word ending with "ing"?

Ghost Train

their flight numbers are FR, it's there airline code (i presume)

Jakey

Its Ryans IATA Code

wikipedia wrote:

[edit] IATA airline designator
IATA airline designators, sometimes called IATA reservation codes, are two-character codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to the world's airlines in accordance with the provisions of IATA Resolution 762. They form the first two characters of the flight number.

Designators are used to identify an airline for all commercial purposes, including reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air waybills and in airline interline telecommunications. There are three types of designator: unique, numeric/alpha and controlled duplicate.

Since 1987 the (ICAO) has been issuing three-letter codes, which are due to be adopted by IATA.[citation needed]

IATA maintains two policies to deal with the limited number of available codes:

after an airline is delisted, the code becomes available for reuse after six months;
IATA issues "controlled duplicates".
Controlled duplicates are issued to regional airlines whose destinations are not likely to overlap, in such a way that the same code would be shared by two different airlines. The controlled duplicate is denoted here with an asterisk (*) following the code and in IATA literature as well.

IATA also issues an accounting or prefix code. This number is used on tickets as the first three characters of the ticket number.

highlydebased

The ICAO code is the longer code (in ryanairs case RYR) while the 2 letter is FR

Aer Lingus ICAO EIN IATA EI
Aer Arann ICAO REA IATA RE


and so on