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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

#291

Post by themafia »

AceyMan wrote: post #68

Under FAA rules this was a screwup. [edit: see my own reply] (However, the rules are subtle, so they can be partially forgiven.) However, I'm not only a dispatcher but also a philosophy BA, so I've found a good way to explain it. Your reserve fuel (the "extra" fuel over what the actual flight burn) can of course be used (hello, that's what it's there for) but—and here's the rub—you can never plan on using it. That is…

If you're into your reserves you should declare an emergency immediately to get priority in air traffic sequencing and control.

Pilots may be organizationally disincentivized when making this decision.

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

#292

Post by themafia »

prism56 wrote: post #277
dlcarrier wrote: post #149

The latest Captains Speaking podcast has an discussion about one of the hosts being in a similar situation: https://youtu.be/5ovlZ221tDQ Fortunately, the flight left with extra fuel, because it was cheaper to carry excess from the origin airport than to buy it at the destination airport, so reserve fuel wasn't needed, but it was close. Also, there was lots of lightning.

I absolutely love insights like this into areas of the world I have no knowledge. Makes absolute sense in the modern world but also something I'd not think about

Trucking companies started adding this to their logistics about a decade ago as well. Once they had accurate fuel price information for most of the country they started telling their drivers precisely how much fuel to onboard at each stop.

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

#293

Post by henryfjordan »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #290
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?

Depends if our goal is to have zero aircraft crashes. If the goal is zero, then for any given parameter, you have to define a margin of safety well before crash territory and treat breaching that margin as seriously as if there had been a crash. Similarly planes are kept 5 nautical miles apart horizontally, and if they get closer than that, you guessed it - investigation. Ofc planes could come within inches and every…

We shouldn't aim for 0 crashes due to low fuel though. How many deaths does carrying around 3x fuel than what you reasonably need contribute to via extra pollution?

We should aim for 1 every 10-100 years or something reasonable like that.

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

#294

Post by anonymars »

krisoft wrote: post #282
recursive wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has ridden a bike up a big hill, and then down it, I don't think you get it back.

That is perplexing. Of course you get the potential energy back. It turns into kinetic energy as you descend. That is why you need not pedal downhill, and often even need to brake to prevent the bike from speeding up too dangerously.

> often even need to brake to prevent the bike from speeding up too dangerously.

Indeed, which is what the airplane would have done on its way down to land. So it's more like riding the brakes on your way down the hill, and now at the bottom when you realize you need to abort the landing, you are at low speed and it's quite an exercise to get back uphill to try again

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

#295

Post by paulbjensen »

It reminds me of a Transavia flight from Girona to Rotterdam that had to be diverted to Amsterdam back in 2015 (1 attempt at Rotterdam, decided to divert to Amsterdam, then 2 attempts in Amsterdam).

It was a particularly stormy weekend and it turns out from the article that they had 992kg of fuel left:

https://avherald.com/h?article=489d4c3f

Massive respect for pilots and the job they do.

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

#296

Post by NetMageSCW »

nostrademons wrote: post #158
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.

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…

To me the 45 minutes in the landing pattern also seems questionable.

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

#298

Post by anonymars »

cibyr wrote: post #202
gmanley wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That example is so well known due to how exceptional it was, especially how the pilots handled it. Robert Pearson, the captain, was a very experienced glider pilot. That's something that not many commercial pilots have. There were also two factors in the landing, that allowed for this to happen. You're going to be coming in really fast for a landing, when gliding in a commercial jet, and you don't have access to your…

The "scraping helped slow it down" theory makes no sense to me. What do you think has a higher coefficient of friction - tire rubber on asphalt, metal on asphalt, or metal on metal?

You seem to be assuming those are "or" rather than "and"

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

#299

Post by dzhiurgis »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #213
loverofhumanz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all." You're confused why they should investigate how everyone on that flight came within minutes of dying? Something about the fuel reserves, procedures, or execution was clearly flawed.

Although credit is due to fuel reserve policies considering they landed after two diversions and three go arounds.

[flagged]

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

#300

Post by ant6n »

Aeolun wrote: post #270
rappatic wrote: post #136

> the Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks... enough for just five or six minutes of flying Maybe I'm just unaware, but it's crazy to me that these planes burn 40 kilograms of jet fuel per minute.

I don’t think that’s so much? A car burns 1 liter to travel 15 kilometer’ish, and carries 4 people. An airplane burns 40 liters to travel 15 kilometers too (900 kph), but carries 160 people. That’s about 40x more than the car, so the fuel economy per passenger is about the same. Of course jet fuel is probably a bit more polluting, but it’s still interesting how close it is.

The greenhouse effects of flying is about 3-5x the effect of just burning the fuel.
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