Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it shouldn't have happened, no matter what You hear that a lot, with Ryanair stories. Sounds like a great airline!
Ryanair has an impeccable safety record.
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Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
341–350 of 586 posts
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#342[deleted]
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#343That 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?
If you cut into the final reserve, it’s a full-blown emergency requiring a mayday call.
This should not happen. So what’s there to investigate? How it was allowed to happen, and how to prevent it from happening again.
EDIT: it’s a mayday even earlier than that. It’s a mayday once the pilots know that they WILL land with less than the final reserve.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 - a turbofan is a subset of jet engine, and there are no 738s running anything other than a turbofan. Actually, nothing in civil aviation that has a "jet engine" has used anything but a turbofan (or turboprop) since the early 70s with the exception of Concorde and some older business jets. (Turboprops are jet engines, too, to be precise, with the jet of exhaust gases powering the propeller.)
> Turboprops are jet engines They are certainly turbine engines, but I thought "jet" was reserved for those engines that propel the vehicle solely by their exhaust stream and bypass air. I am willing to be told I'm wrong, though.
Turbofans are by your own definition jet engines. It's just that the bypass air is much larger.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#345> 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.
> 40 kilograms of jet fuel per minute.
That is going to vary considerably between cruising and ascending.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#346Earlier 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?
This reminds of discussions following the Fukushima disaster where one commenter claimed that it wasn't a design flaw, because it was an extraordinary circumstance. I found this appalling, because I do not at all think that was the risk profile that was sold to the public; I think people believed that it was supposed to be designed to safely survive 1000-year earthquakes and the tsunamis that they create. Likewise, I…
I'm sure we can all remember at least one person in any situation who will say something we find memorably awful.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The glider guys would always suggest a forward slip. It's a lot of fun to do. It's not taught often enough during primary training for powered airplanes.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#348Is it like in the car where you have no fuel left but there’s a reserve of another 10 liters?
Yes and no. I had this happen recently and looked into it.
My wife has been using my car, which is a Diesel Golf with a fuel capacity of 14.5 gallons. We set off driving one Saturday to visit my parents, and I noticed the fuel gauge was below empty already. By the time I got to the gas station, I put 14.3 gallons of fuel into it. I calculated that that works out to be about a cup and a half of fuel.
So once you hit empty on my car, you definitely have a ways you can drive still. I feel comfortable driving about 30+ miles, and it's never died on me. That puts it at no more than 1 gallon of fuel left in the car based on my experience (not scientific I know, but I've owned 2 of these cars, with about 190k total driven miles). It's a lot less than 10 liters from E to Dead on the roadside.
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#349For anyone interested, here is the flight playback: https://fr24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4
Sub required. I can wait for the Pete the Irish Pilot’s take though.
this one is available - https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/RYR3418/history/2025...
Re: Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
#350> 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.
Yeah, when people say "flying has a high carbon footprint", they're not kidding . It's really quite massive. I don't fly any more.
Don't look up the carbon footprint of driving then. That is even higher in comparison to most passenger flights.