How far a car must drive to burn the fuel a Boeing 747 uses in just 1 second

Ever wondered how far a car must drive to burn the fuel a Boeing 747 uses in just one second? Well, it turns out that the airplanes are thirsty beasts compared to their land-roaming counterparts.

A Boeing 747 cruising at altitude burns about one gallon of fuel every single second, which feels like once you’ve blinked, the plane has already guzzled enough to fill your car’s whole tank.

If you compare the gas-guzzling behaviour of the Boeing 747 with various varieties of car, that’s when you can see quite how greedy the plane actually is.

Comparing America’s most popular cars with the fuel-chugging giant that is the 747, you can see how far you can get on one second’s worth of plane fuel.

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How far a car must drive to burn 1 second of fuel in a Boeing 747

We now know that the Boeing 747 is a thirsty, gas-guzzling beast, but when we compare the airplane to other cars, it shows how truly quickly gas is consumed in the air.

The certified eco-champion, the Toyota Prius, is much more of a gas-sipper than a guzzler, and coming in at 52 mpg, one second of Boeing 747 fuel would take the Prius 52 miles – the equivalent of from NYC to New Haven, Connecticut.

In the electric corner, we have the Tesla Model 3, which of course, doesn’t use any gas whatsoever, but if you compare energy usage, it comes out to about 132 MPGe.

This means that a Tesla Model 3 could go 132 miles using the same amount of energy a 747 burns in one second – that’s Los Angeles to San Diego.

How America’s favorite truck fares

Compared to the other two, the Ford F-150 is a proper gas-guzzler, and at only 20 mpg, you could get 20 miles between Dallas and Fort Worth on one second of jet fuel.

How would a supercar fare?

A Ferrari 488 GTB burns a very inefficient 15 mpg of fuel, but you could still get 15 miles on one second of plane gas, that’s a quick sprint from Miami to Fort Lauderdale.

As America is known for it’s big gas-guzzling SUVs, the Range Rover Sport operates at a very inefficient 19 mpg, meaning that you could do a comfortable cruise from Chicago to Oak Brook, Illinois on one second of plane fuel.

So, in one second of burnt fuel in a Boeing 747, that same gallon could power anything from a 15-mile Ferrari sprint to a 132-mile Tesla run.

Next time you fill up your car, remember: while you’re stretching that gallon over miles of highway, a 747 just burned the same amount in the time it took you to read this sentence.

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