Airlines Lighten Their Loads : In the battle to trim higher fuel costs, even colors and colas count.

NEW YORK — Faced with soaring fuel costs and the threat of shortages, airlines have taken or are planning steps to save fuel.

Reacting to the worldwide embargo against oil from Iraq and Kuwait, the carriers are trying to eliminate every bit of extra weight from their planes. Supplies of food, soft drinks, wine and blankets are being limited. Exterior dirt, which slows planes, is being washed off more frequently. Lighter carpets and seats are being installed, and international passengers’ right to carry duty-free items might be in jeopardy.

Most carriers no longer paint their aircraft, cutting weight by about 300 pounds. Airlines are considering limiting free travel for employees and families. There has even been a suggestion--almost certainly facetious--that crew members be required to diet to get rid of excess weight.

The airlines are also trying to save jet fuel in other ways, such as flying slower and taxiing planes with some of their engines shut down. Slower flying could have unpopular consequences: Some flights would miss the noise-limitation curfews at airports, including Orange County’s John Wayne and Washington’s National.

Fuel costs were crucial to airlines even before Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2. They had already invested massively in more fuel-efficient aircraft and in on-board computers that allow flights to be planned at optimum speeds and altitudes as well as along the most fuel-efficient routes.

But the Persian Gulf crisis has increased the sense of urgency. “I am concerned about the fuel effects of the Iraqi-Kuwait crisis on the traveling public and the competitiveness and vitality of the airline industry,” Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner said as he set up an industry task force recently to deal with the problem.

He noted that transportation is the most petroleum-intensive sector of the U.S. economy, accounting for 63% of petroleum consumption in 1989. Of this, jet fuel for commercial, military and civilian aircraft accounts for 14%.

Some efforts to conserve are innovative. Others are obvious. A few are leftovers of fuel-conservation measures implemented in earlier crises in the mid-1970s and early 1980s that are being dusted off.

Such economizing is imperative. Oil prices had been rising all summer but surged strongly when Iraq invaded Kuwait and have been going up almost daily since then.

Pan American World Airways’ experience has been typical. According to Chairman Thomas Plaskett, the airline was paying 61 cents a gallon before the hostilities but a few days ago was shelling out $1.02.

For Eastern Airlines, which is struggling to lift itself out of bankruptcy, the fuel increases are devastating. Martin R. Shugrue, the airline’s bankruptcy trustee, said Eastern’s fuel price has risen from 56 cents a gallon in the summer to about 98 cents a gallon.

“It is obviously hurting our recovery efforts,” he said in an interview. “But this goes far beyond Eastern. It is a very, very serious problem within the industry for those of us who don’t have deep enough pockets to withstand this kind of cost pressure.”

Airlines are raising fares to blunt the impact of the fuel price increases. They went up more than 5% a month ago and an additional 4.2% on Monday.

Jet fuel accounts for about 15% of an airline’s expenses. It is the industry’s second-largest cost, next to labor. For giant American Airlines, a 1-cent-a-gallon rise in fuel prices increases costs by $2 million a month, Chairman Robert Crandall said.

Airline analyst Edward Starkman of the New York investment firm Paine Webber Inc. says that as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, “we have taken $1.3 billion out of our 1990 industry operating profit projection, which now stands at a loss of $300 million.”

“There isn’t one big dramatic thing that is going on to save fuel,” says Joseph F. McLaughlin, USAir’s vice president-flying. “There are a lot of little ideas over a lot of flights.” His carrier alone, he points out, has 3,000 flights a day. “If we can save a very little bit on those 3,000 flights for 365 days a year, we have saved a lot of fuel.”

The weight of airliners is crucial, and one phenomenon that airlines must contend with is that, as planes get older, they get heavier because they are patched up and more equipment is loaded on them. Boeing Co., the leading manufacturer of airliners, estimates that plane weight increases about a quarter of 1% annually. On a Boeing 727, that adds up to 250 pounds a year.

According to Darol Hinton, chief of aerodynamics engineering for Boeing’s commercial airplane subsidiary in Renton, Wash., each pound added to a Boeing 727 burns an extra 22.5 gallons a year.

Thus, carrying a single soft-drink can, weighing just under a pound when full, costs about $22.50 a year when jet fuel costs $1 a gallon. For United Airlines, which has 136 727s in its fleet, carrying one can on each 727 amounts to an annual expenditure of more than $3,000.

The newer, more fuel-efficient Boeing 757 burns only an extra 12.5 gallons of fuel a year for each extra pound, significantly cutting costs.

Some other weight-reduction efforts by the airlines:

* USAir may soon ask cockpit crew members to share the five aeronautical map manuals each carries.

* SwissAir pilots are spending more time training in flight simulators, rather than using planes in flight. This saves about 13.2 million gallons of fuel a year.

* Japan Air Lines recently unveiled the world’s first fully automatic jumbo jet washing machine at Narita Airport near Tokyo. Because the robot allows the planes to be washed more frequently, they haul around less dirt. It’s too early to accurately assess the savings, but one executive said there is a potential annual saving of “about $2.4 million by keeping our planes clean.”

JAL has also installed lighter-weight carpeting in its 747s, saving almost 200 pounds on each of the 58 planes, a total of more than 11,000 pounds.

* Delta Air Lines is examining whether it is carrying too many cans of soft drinks on its planes. A domestic 727 flight generally carries 10 cases, each of which weighs about 20 pounds.

It has even been suggested that when duty-free items are sold in one country, they be delivered later at the destination. “Why do these items have to travel in the air with the passenger?” asks Walter S. Coleman, vice president of the Air Transport Assn., an industry trade group.

But cutting weight isn’t the only way to conserve fuel.

Most carriers greatly restrict the use of auxiliary power units (APUs) on the jets because they burn too much fuel. These units are used for everything from air conditioning to brewing coffee and burn as much as $45 in fuel an hour. Northwest Airlines won’t use its APUs while its planes are on the ground. The first pot of coffee on each plane every morning is brought aboard in a thermos so it doesn’t have to be brewed on board, using the APU.

The amount of fuel an airliner carries also determines how much can be conserved. So airlines are making every effort to accurately plan their fuel loads. It costs money to carry more fuel than necessary. A flight to Tokyo, says Northwest Airlines, will burn 75 gallons of fuel for every 150 gallons of extra fuel carried.

Constantly assessing prices to determine where to buy fuel is also a must. For example, Northwest says that because fuel prices in Duluth, Minn., are high, its flights carry enough fuel to go there from the Minneapolis-St. Paul hub and back without filling up.

Pan American World Airways flights to Port of Spain, Trinidad, take along enough fuel these days so they don’t have to fill up on the Caribbean Island, where jet fuel costs $1.27 a gallon.

The fuel conservation drive has changed some of the fundamentals of the airline business. Speed was once a central consideration. If American could boast that its New York-Los Angeles flight could make the distance in just a few minutes less than Trans World Airlines, it had a competitive edge.

Furthermore, speed reduced labor costs by reducing wages and overtime paid to crew members. But that was when fuel made up a much smaller portion of an airline’s operating costs. Things are different now.

Some fuel-saving procedures are hardly noticed by passengers. Like many of its competitors, American Airlines now taxis its planes on one or two engines. A 727-200 burns 5.8 gallons a minute when taxiing with all three engines running, says Robert W. Baker, American’s executive vice president of operations. Assuming a fuel cost of $1 a gallon, that’s $5.80 a minute.

HOW CRUDE OIL PRICES AFFECT AIRLINES . . . AND FARES

The prospect of war in the Mideast has raised the specter of crude oil prices of $50 a barrel and higher. The chart below shows how even a small increase in the price of crude has a significant effect on the cost of jet fuel . . .

. . . and an increase of a few cents a gallon in the cost of jet fuel costs the U.S. airline industry hundreds of millions of dollars.

In order to recover that cost, airlines raise fares. Even a small fare increase would raise billions in additional revenue for the industry. JET FUEL PER GALLON IF: Oil is $18/Barrel Crude: 60 Oil is $21 Crude: 71 COST TO AIRLINE INDUSTRY IF: Fuel has 1/gallon increase: $180 million Fuel has 11/gallon increase: $1.7 billion POTENTIAL ADDITIONAL REVENUE IF: 1% fare increase: $560 million 3.1% fare increase: $1.7 billion Source: Airline Economics Inc.