Probably an issue with which side of the pond you are on but when I said "short domestic hop" I didn't mean NY-Chicago but Paris-Lyon, London-Manchester, Hamburg-Berlin, where you do not reach full travel height.
And since we're both picking nits: yes, the extra fuel for the ascent of a longer flight does not really matter but it is there and the statement as such stays correct
But as I said that certainly is not what was meant. MC isn't a flight engineer and him getting facts and/or terms wrong should not be that surprising.
I mean in a way I know how you feel, I had it in a different game myself and decided to do a
fake outrage post over there. These things may happen in movies too, and when you see it you can't unsee it. And while it doesn't really matter for the story as a whole there is a certain amount of disappointment when a dev starts getting technical and then getting it wrong.
That being said, by applying Occam's razor I would still argue that it is more likely that this is a mistake by the dev and/or the MC instead of a subtle hint of the state of Earth technology to be used to assess later story elements by.