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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

#171

Post by refulgentis »

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?

Lets say a plane crew claims low fuel.

The pilot in charge has to file a writeup.

When someone accepts the writeup, there's a random chance it's selected for followup. If/when they discover there was enough fuel, it will affect the career(s) of person(s) involved.

First, generally, people don't like having to do paperwork, and especially don't like doing paperwork to help you land a little quicker.

While one time may not be a fireable offense, you will find you career affected in the number of ways people can find to be uncooperative with you, or not support you when you attempt to advance your career within the company.

Developing a habit would lead your interlocutors to escalate the situation, which would lead to discipline up to and including the company firing person(s) involved.

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

#172

Post by jacquesm »

deadbabe wrote: post #162
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, even though that is a harsh conclusion to make and for the families involved of course it doesn't matter at all. But as these come this was bad but still not nearly as bad as it could have been. They were about to cross one of the busiest highways in NL, another 100 meters and it would have been an entirely different story. The field they landed in is in the Haarlemmermeerpolder, so clay and it had just been plowed.

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

#173

Post by immibis »

abtinf wrote: post #40
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…

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?

Whether it can be prevented in the future. Should planes fly with even more reserve fuel? It's possible. Or maybe different ways of selecting alternate landing sites?

It may even be the answer is "no, everything went as well as it possibly could have, and adding more reserve fuel to every flight would be unacceptably wasteful, so oh well", but at a minimum they'll probably recommend even more fuel on certain flights into risky weather.

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

#174

Post by MaxikCZ »

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?

4 replies and 3 are dismissing even the idea..

Yes, you get "some" back, and its not negligible amount. Typical modern airliner can descend on 15-20:1, giving you over 150-200km (90-120mi) range from typical cruising altitude of 33 000 feet even with engines off. Most everyday descents are actually done by maintaining altitude as long as possible, and then iddling the engines fully for as long as clearance allows. (Ofc you then use engines as you geat nearer, because its safer to be a little low when stabilizing on approach, than a little high)

Thanks to turbofans(edited from turboprops) better efficiency + less drag at higher altitude its actually more fuel economical to command full thrust and gain altitude quickly, than slower climb, or maintaining altitude (which goes against our intuition from cars, where if you wanna get far, you never give full throttle).

But theres still some drag, so you dont get everything back, so you generally want to avoid murking in low altitudes as long as possible. Full thrust repeatedly at lowest altitudes (from failed go arounds) is the least economical part of flight, so you want to avoid those if possible. But its true that the altitude you gain is equivalent to "banking" the energy, just not all of it.

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

#175

Post by immibis »

jjk7 wrote: post #143
psunavy03 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the unions are there to allow the pilots to advocate for all kinds of safety-of-flight related things like fuel reserves, crew rest, and so forth that management would be happy to cut to save money. And to do so without fear of retaliation. And if you don't think the airlines would love to lobby Congress about the regulatory backstop, well . . .

I think the literal fear of death _might_ be motivation enough for pilots to advocate for safety? And if they want to fire you, would you want to work for them anyways?

The alternative to employment is death. Many people are willing to take a possible chance of dying to avert a certainty of dying.

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

#176

Post by jacquesm »

lenerdenator wrote: post #139
jjk7 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be more reliable than just ensuring there are consequences for lying?

Perhaps. If the pilot knows that the ATC can see he's full of it, he might be less likely to lie. Those who still do can be grounded and be moved into management or take up a career in politics.

As a rule airline pilots don't lie about this stuff. They take safety pretty seriously.

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

#177

Post by mlyle »

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?

When you declare a fuel emergency or even urgency, there's often follow up to figure out why (mechanical issue? problem with dispatch? problem with flying technique? exceptional weather condition that could be forecast better? etc). And there is plenty of data in aviation to know what happened.

Dispatch knows how much fuel they say they put in.

Your flight time, speeds, and profile are known.

ACARS may be reporting fuel use throughout the flight.

etc, etc, etc.

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

#178

Post by Hackbraten »

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]

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Even though I’ve read the entire article, I found it very difficult to mentally visualize and ended up not noticing that there were three destination airports involved.

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

#180

Post by ktallett »

jacquesm wrote: post #123
ktallett wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the issue is more that they decided to make so many attempts to land local. There should be a max level of attempts.

There is a lot of pressure on pilots to land local. But 3 go-arounds happens, not often, but it does.

Perhaps that decision needs to be removed from the airline and there needs to be an independent decision maker there.
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