The two-week rule for fuel prices
A fuel price is a fact with a date on it. JetDesk treats a logged price as good for two weeks and says so plainly after that, because a stale $6.40 is worse than no number at all.
01Why fourteen days
FBOs reprice on deliveries, and deliveries at a busy field run weekly to biweekly. Retail Jet A also follows the wholesale market with a lag of about that long. Two weeks is the window in which a logged price is more likely right than wrong. After that, the log shows a STALE tag and the fuel stop math still uses it, with the tag visible, so the decision is yours.
02The market reference
The Fuel Stop tab shows the Gulf Coast Jet A wholesale spot (U.S. EIA) and live WTI crude (OilPriceAPI), each with its recent change. Neither is a ramp price; retail runs several dollars above wholesale. What they tell you is whether the whole board has moved since you last logged. If wholesale is up thirty cents, every stale price in your log is probably low.
03Community prices
No public API publishes FBO prices, and the sites that list them do not allow scraping, so JetDesk does not. Instead, operations that opt in share their logged prices anonymously (airport, price, date, nothing else) and see the community median, range and number of operations for any airport where at least two other operations have reported in the last 60 days. The route finder uses that median when your own crew has no price. It is give to get: you see it only if you share.
04The receipt is the best data there is
When you log a flight and enter fuel bought and the price paid, JetDesk drops that price into the crew's log for that airport automatically. It is dated, it is real, and it took no extra effort. Crews that log their receipts have price logs that are never stale.
More field notes
Reserve fuel, and the alternate nobody plans
How JetDesk decides whether a leg makes reserve, and why the alternate is where most fuel stops really come from.
Why block time swings twenty minutes
How the FAA winds aloft forecast becomes a groundspeed for each leg, and why the return leg costs more than the outbound one.
Weight before fuel: payload runs out first
Zero fuel weight, max fuel by weight and landing weight for a Piper Meridian with five aboard, and how JetDesk shows it per leg.