[EdwardDiego]

True, but not every approach to an airport is a nice constant vector.

Continuous descent operations are the optimal, but there's plenty of suboptimal airport approaches that require level flight at a height where fuel efficiency is far less than at cruising altitude.

[LegitShady]

Do you have any statistics to say it happens so often that airplane landings are so suboptimal that they use anywhere near climbing fuel rates and times that it matters to the overall discussion? It seems unlikely to me.

[dredmorbius]

They don't.

Nor can they actually read and interpret the sources they did scrounge up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29207783