Estimate fuel from the command line

You don't need to write any Python to estimate fuel flow. Installing acropole gives you an acropole command that reads a flight file, estimates fuel flow, and writes the enriched table back to disk.

For the full list of options, see the CLI reference.

A simple CSV with standard column names

If your file already uses the standard names (typecode, groundspeed, altitude, vertical_rate, …), just point the command at it:

acropole estimate flight.csv

This writes flight_fuel.csv next to the input — the original columns plus fuel_flow (kg/s) and fuel_flow_kgh (kg/h). On success the command prints:

wrote 1234 rows with fuel columns to flight_fuel.csv

A CSV with your own column names

When your columns use different names, map each feature with the matching flag. Map only what differs — anything you omit falls back to the standard name. The bundled QAR flight uses non-standard names:

acropole estimate examples/example_flight.csv \
  --typecode FLPL_AIRC_TYPE --groundspeed GRND_SPD_KT --altitude ALTI_STD_FT \
  --vertical-rate VERT_SPD_FTMN --airspeed TRUE_AIR_SPD_KT --mass MASS_KG \
  --second FLIGHT_TIME --out result.csv

Passing --second (here the FLIGHT_TIME column) lets the model derive accelerations and adds a fuel_cumsum column (cumulative kg burned).

Write parquet instead of CSV

The output format follows the --out extension, independent of the input:

acropole estimate flight.csv --out flight_fuel.parquet

A parquet input works the same way — acropole estimate flight.parquet writes flight_fuel.parquet by default.

Process a batch of files

The command handles one file per call; loop in your shell to process many. Each file is written next to itself with a _fuel suffix:

for f in flights/*.csv; do
  acropole estimate "$f"
done

Or write the results into a separate directory:

mkdir -p enriched
for f in flights/*.csv; do
  acropole estimate "$f" --out "enriched/$(basename "$f")"
done

Errors stop the run

If a file is missing, has an unsupported format, or lacks a mapped column, the command prints the error to stderr and exits with status 1. In a loop, add || continue after the command to skip a bad file and keep going.