Jumbo jets use 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off.

OMG thats alot of fuel hehe

In a car, you could travel from California to Maine and still have plenty of fuel left over.

That sounds a bit exaggerated. a Boeing 747 fuel tank, for instance, can take about 52 U.S. Gallons of fuel. Assuming take off, takes about 30 seconds, you'll be burning 8,000 Gallons a minute or 480,000 Gallons each hour on full throttle. That said you have to nearly shutdown the engines during the rest of the travel. This maybe true if you assume take off as the time you take to reach cruising speed, but that is wrong to.

I meant cruising altitude, not cruising speed

very good