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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

#161

Post by kbolino »

gus_massa wrote: post #151
lenerdenator wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This incident is known as the Gimli Glider and was actually due to multiple failures before the pound-kilogram issue (and the backdrop of Canada's then-recent metrication) even became relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

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

#162

Post by deadbabe »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
deadbabe wrote: post #38

On the positive side, if they had made a crash landing with so little fuel, there would not likely have been a fiery explosion, and many more passengers would have survived than normal?

Air + fuel explodes just fine. You really don't want to crash an airliner. At landing speed the number of people dead will still be > 0 and the remainder has a good chance of being injured seriously. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951 This happened at landing speed (the airport is only a few hundred meters from the crash site) and the plane was at the end of its flight from Turke…

Only 7% died, pretty good for a plane of that size with a rough landing.

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

#163

Post by scrumper »

AceyMan wrote: post #126
AceyMan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update: OK, if *Edinburgh* was their alternate and they missed there and were then forced to bugout for Manchester, that's then an example of when reserve is OK to be burned. (The 'slight simplification' I omitted was unpacking how the alternate fuel plays into the process, but here, that was a key part of the series of events.) That's what I get for not reading TFA first :-/

[flagged]

I'm curious why you did that? It's not a very complicated sequence. The whole point of engaging in a discussion here is to think about the issues raised and offer a point of view while incorporating other perspectives into yours. You've spent your money to bypass the whole intent of this site; akin to you being hungry then sending someone else to a restaurant for you so you can later read their review of the food.

EDIT and you of most of the commenters here, with your industry background, are better placed to offer an opinion!

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

#164

Post by bluGill »

jacquesm wrote: post #77
bluGill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the flight was a lot longer than planed. How much extra do we need. They declared an emergency, and thus put themselves at the front of the line. They had 6 more minutes to do that touch and go around if that happened, and since they were already in a low fuel emergency they get priority and so there is enough time to do that if they needed. (edit - as others have noted, 6 minutes with high error bars, so t…

> They had 6 more minutes to do that touch and go around if that happened 6 minutes is way out of the comfort zone. They might not have made it in that case.

I agree, well out of comfort zones. However to my reading multiple different things went wrong to get to this point.

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

#165

Post by jacquesm »

troupo wrote: post #127
nickff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel depletion is risky, but not that risky; see the Gimli Glider for a case much more dangerous than this, which still worked out amazingly well. Edit: Here is the Wiki on incidents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_starvation_and_fuel_exhau...

You could've read at least the Wikipedia page on how miraculous Gimli Glider was. From "all engine failure is never expected and not covered in training" to "Pearson was an experienced glider pilot familiar with techniques rarely needed in commercial flights" to the amount of maneuvers they had to execute on a barely responding aircraft

Exactly, the takeaway from that saga is that extreme luck does happen, not that flying without fuel is perfectly safe.

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

#166

Post by coolThingsFirst »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #145
coolThingsFirst wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

const estimateFuel = (distanceInKms, litersPerKm) => distanceInKms * litersPerKm;

I don't even know what I'm talking about, but you at least forgot to account for headwinds and differing drag amounts at different altitudes/speeds.

Yes it was a bit of humor, sad it didn’t land.

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

#167

Post by jacquesm »

bluGill wrote: post #164
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had 6 more minutes to do that touch and go around if that happened 6 minutes is way out of the comfort zone. They might not have made it in that case.

I agree, well out of comfort zones. However to my reading multiple different things went wrong to get to this point.

That could be. We just don't know right now, but your intuition may well be correct, even if there is a single root cause there could very well be multiple contributory causes.

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

#168

Post by ajkjk »

AceyMan wrote: post #126
AceyMan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update: OK, if *Edinburgh* was their alternate and they missed there and were then forced to bugout for Manchester, that's then an example of when reserve is OK to be burned. (The 'slight simplification' I omitted was unpacking how the alternate fuel plays into the process, but here, that was a key part of the series of events.) That's what I get for not reading TFA first :-/

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#169

Post by bluGill »

behringer wrote: post #88
bluGill wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the flight was a lot longer than planed. How much extra do we need. They declared an emergency, and thus put themselves at the front of the line. They had 6 more minutes to do that touch and go around if that happened, and since they were already in a low fuel emergency they get priority and so there is enough time to do that if they needed. (edit - as others have noted, 6 minutes with high error bars, so t…

With 6 minutes left everyone could have died if anything went wrong with the final landing, even a gust of wind could have ended everybody's life.

Could have, but pilots practice no fuel landings all the time (in simulators). If they can get to ground that is "level enough" nobody dies. It is not something you ever want to see in the real world (and in the real world people often do die when it happens), but it isn't automating people die.

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

#170

Post by geor9e »

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…

Do forecasted storms go into the fuel estimate formulas?
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