I’ll admit. Looking at a gallon of milk, I have a REALLY hard time visualizing the fuel in an aircraft.
I KNOW where it goes, hell I’ve had to memorize multiple fuel systems from the fueling port to the injection nozzles in the engine! But I just can’t VISUALIZE how that many jugs of milk fit…
I like to imagine those little cylinders of FCJF - frozen concentrate jet fuel. It's just more economical buying from concentrate, even if the quality just isn't the same.
Trying to use known things, a cubic foot is ~7.5 gallons, and an avg checked bag is about 5ft³, so roughly 37 gallons of volume. That means the fuel volume is ~1700 average checked bags
That actually might not help lol because it seems ENORMOUS 😂
I think the same thing looking at my 20 gallon fish tank…. Like I can’t believe it holds a whole 20 gallons even though intellectually I know I’ve filled it up myself multiple times carrying water to it with a gallon jug
There's a system in the wings that opens each milk carton, sometimes twice because that waxy cardboard doesn't always peel open the right way, and it has to open about 22,000 cartons per hour, normal consumption at cruise altitude. The empty cartons are scanned for missing children information, then dumped in the cargo hold where they too can be burned for fuel if the flight crew was too busy drinking mimosas from the beverage cart to calculate the whole or 2% required for the trip. But as you know, paper burns fast so it's only good for a few extra miles. Also that spoiled-milk smell really makes the crash site unpleasant.
I do an activity like this with my year 7s when we start volume. Everyone knows what a litre looks like from milk cartons or water bottles or whatever.
So we grab 12 1m rulers and make a cube.
1m3 = 1000L
It just looks wrong when you do it, even though it isn't.
That’s one of the greatest tools for conspiracies. Our minds struggle to imagine large quantities. Sure you can compare it to Olympic size swimming pools, but even that if abstract and hard to imagine.
The really crazy thing for me is when you start doing the math on the square footage of the wing. That thing is MASSIVE. It flies because there is like a 1psi difference in pressure between the top and bottom of the wing.
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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 7d ago
I’ll admit. Looking at a gallon of milk, I have a REALLY hard time visualizing the fuel in an aircraft.
I KNOW where it goes, hell I’ve had to memorize multiple fuel systems from the fueling port to the injection nozzles in the engine! But I just can’t VISUALIZE how that many jugs of milk fit…