The stop nobody mentioned.

Range figures are published as NBAA IFR range: four passengers, standard reserves, no wind. Your trip has eight passengers, their luggage, a headwind and an alternate. Every one of those takes range away, and none of them appears in the brochure.

What eats the number

Payload. Fuel and passengers compete for the same weight allowance. Filling the seats on a light jet can cost several hundred nautical miles of range, and it is the single most common reason a trip that looked nonstop is not.

Wind. Westbound across the United States in winter, a 60-knot headwind is ordinary. At a 450-knot cruise that is more than a 10% penalty on ground speed, and it comes straight off your effective range.

Track miles. The great-circle distance is the shortest path, not the one you fly. Around 6% over the straight line is a standard planning allowance — on a 2,000 nautical mile leg that is another 120 miles the aircraft has to have fuel for.

Altitude and elevation at the ends. A hot day at a high-elevation departure field can force a lower fuel load, turning a marginal nonstop into a certain stop.

What a stop actually costs

Roughly 45 minutes of block time — descent, landing, fuelling, departure — plus a landing and handling fee at the technical stop. It is not catastrophic. It is worth knowing in advance, and it is worth pricing against the alternative: a larger aircraft that goes nonstop often costs less in total than a smaller one that stops, once the extra block time and the second set of airport fees are counted.

The rule of thumb

If your leg is within about 10% of an aircraft's published range, treat it as a conversation rather than a booking. Ask the operator to run the numbers for your actual passenger count and the forecast winds on your date. A good one will do it before you ask; this site flags a fuel stop whenever the routed distance exceeds published range, but it cannot know your luggage or the weather three weeks out.

Why brokers sometimes do not mention it

A quote with a stop looks worse than a quote without one, and the aircraft that stops is usually the cheaper aircraft. That is the incentive; the defence against it is asking the question directly — is this leg nonstop with my party and my bags, on the day, and what is the alternate plan if the winds are against us?