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Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

theguardian.com

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Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#151

Post by gus_massa »

lenerdenator wrote: post #122
fidotron wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have known former air traffic controllers that won't fly certain airlines because of a notorious habit some have for queue jumping by claiming they're low on fuel. If they are low on fuel is something else, but in any case when the ATCs have noticed a pattern then something is up. This situation sounds a lot less nefarious, but it does also sound like they should have rerouted earlier.

Kinda surprised there's no data link for that sort of telemetry so that you don't necessarily have to take the pilot's word for it.

I expect that they take the pilot's word in case of a rare situation [1] and then make the fill a ton of paparwork to try to solve the main cause and also discourage lies.

[1] In one case someone mixed imperial and metric unix, and instead of $something-kilograms, they put only $something-pounds of fuel.

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#153

Post by SJC_Hacker »

nradov wrote: post #129
fidotron wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way. Having attended meetings at ICAO I can also tell you many details of various aviation incidents, including their existence, are covered by some secret classification. This fact being disclosed caused most of the attendees to lose all hope in the rest of the proceedings. To their credit the FAA reps on that occasion were by far the most reasonable gov representatives in the room, and the FAA are one of the maj…

Which specific civil aviation incidents are covered by some secret classification?

> Which specific civil aviation incidents are covered by some secret classification?

You would have to have secret clearance to know which ones

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#154

Post by scrumper »

metalman wrote: post #66
abtinf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended? On a nominally 2h45m flight, they spent an extra 2 hours in the air, presumably doing doing fuel intensive altitude changing maneuvers, and were eventually able to land safely with their reserves almost exhausted. I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all. How much fuel should they have landed with?

6 min, is empty, 6 min is purely theoretical, 6 min would not clear for ground handling or a test start, or a fuel system check,6 min would not do a go around. will interesting to see if they release info about what the real amount of fuel left is, and an authorative discussion on how much useable flight time was there. did they actualy make the taxi to the terminal?, or run out on the apron?

I think the article says that someone saw 220kg written on a log - that's about 6 minutes worth at cruise. So yeah, it's zero basically.

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#155

Post by yodelshady »

jacquesm wrote: post #56
psunavy03 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason why those fuel reserves exist is to be a guard band allowing situations like this to happen without flames, wreckage, and death. Having worked with many US airline pilots over the years, this is also why they are so proud to be unionized. Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers, but the union is also there so that management doesn't get bright ideas about things like cutting fuel rese…

Management can't cut fuel reserves, not because the pilots are unionized but because there are some very strict rules about these fuel estimations prior to take off and margins be damned. And those rules are exactly there because otherwise this kind of incident would happen far more frequently. But it's regulation that is the backstop here, not the pilots.

Regulations are paper. Who enforces the behaviour, of whether to take off or not, on a windy night in central Italy?

Of course the pilots are the backstop, and the unions are theirs, so they can make necessary calls the money doesn't like.

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#156

Post by robotresearcher »

dTal wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just reaching altitude again to make it to the first and later second alternate are mostly likely the biggest factors in the extra fuel consumption. That's very expensive.

You get that energy back on descent, no?

No, and you don't want it. You want to be on the ground and stopped. In the lowest energy state.

It's not currently feasible to harvest it into fuel. It's (very very nearly) all lost to drag, on purpose.

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#157

Post by jacquesm »

krisoft wrote: post #116
jacquesm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have more water in the fuel than you think you do (there always is some due to condensation in the tanks) then you might be able to reach your destination but you'll be burning more 'fuel' than your original estimate would have you believe because there is less power per unit weight of (contaminated) fuel. This is fairly common in GA and there are cases where it has happened in scheduled flights as well. That'…

Interesting. That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation!

It's supposed to be an extremely low amount and the fuel pick-ups are placed such that it should never be a problem but there have been cases where water in the fuel caused problems, including at least one notorious crash where the cause was identified to be fuel contamination.

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#158

Post by nostrademons »

fidotron wrote: post #87
jacquesm wrote: post #23

That is very exceptional. I've written fuel estimation software for airliners (cargo, fortunately), and the number of rules regarding go-arounds, alternates and holding time resulted in there usually being quite a bit of fuel in the tanks on landing, by design. I've never heard of '6 minutes left' in practice where it wasn't a massive issue and the investigation into how this could have happened will make for interes…

I have known former air traffic controllers that won't fly certain airlines because of a notorious habit some have for queue jumping by claiming they're low on fuel. If they are low on fuel is something else, but in any case when the ATCs have noticed a pattern then something is up. This situation sounds a lot less nefarious, but it does also sound like they should have rerouted earlier.

Since there's a lot of confusion in the comments below I'm going to hijack one of the top comments to make a couple points clear from the article and FlightRadar24 data: [1]

They did reroute earlier. It was 2 failed attempts on Prestwick (Glasgow), 45 minutes in the landing pattern, then they diverted to Edinburgh (15 minute flight), a failed attempt at Edinburgh (~5-10 minutes), and then they diverted to Manchester (45 minute flight) and landed successfully there. Likely they hit their reserve just as the Edinburgh landing failed and decided to fly to Manchester, with clearer skies, rather than risk another failure in their reserve.

IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride). Second, if the Edinburgh landing had been successful they would not have eaten into their reserve and no investigation would've been needed. Third, the Monday-morning quarterbacking could've easily gone the other direction if they had diverted to Manchester ("Why did you choose an airport 178 miles away and risk eating into your fuel reserve when Edinburgh was right there?")

[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4

Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

#159

Post by jacquesm »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #147
jacquesm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming you're low when you are not is going to cause a major headache for the PIC, they're going to have to write that up and they may well be investigated. If it turns out they were lying they would likely find out that that is a career limiting move and if it happens too often then that too should result in consequences. The main reason is that your fake emergency may cause someone else to have a real one.

What’s the mechanism for them to get caught?

Random spot checks. Every day at every airport some of these will get verified. Also, the next pilot would have to be willing to cover for you because they are going to have to falsify their records to make your trick invisible. You record the amount of fuel in the tank when you take command of the aircraft, the amount of fuel that was loaded and from that it is trivial to compute how much was left the last time it landed.
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