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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

#381

Post by hinkley »

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?

One of those YouTube channels where a professional pilot evaluates flying incidents had a similar incident when the pilot started yelling at the tower when they tried to make him go around again. He essentially said he would declare an emergency if he didn’t hear different instructions. I think he had 10-15 minutes when he touched down.

One of the things the reserve is for is if the plane immediately in front of you fucks up the runway, you now have to divert to the next airport. You need at least enough fuel to get there and for the tower to shove everyone else out of the way so you can make an emergency landing.

There are other reasons someone could abort a landing and have to go around again, besides debris in the runway. And sometimes two of them can happen consecutively.

In the case I’m referencing, it was pointed out that p the pilot made things worse by going faster than he was told to fly, using up fuel and also making him too close to a previous plane which forced him to go around the previous time, so it wasn’t all the tower.

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

#383

Post by rjsw »

pmyteh wrote: post #278
allturtles wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone totally ignorant of British airports, a Google maps search for "airports northern england" shows Teesside, Carlisle, and Newcastle all significantly closer to Edinburgh than Manchester. Are these not places where a 737 under emergency could land? Or was the weather also bad there?

Carlisle is small (and not currently licensed for public use) - not an ideal place to drop a 737 if there's a choice. It's also not that far from Prestwick so may have had similar weather. Newcastle and Teesside are both on the East coast and likely to be affected by similar weather to Edinburgh given the storm coming in from the North East. The next closest will be Manchester or Leeds/Bradford, with Manchester being…

Leeds/Bradford is on a plateau and can get affected by wind.

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

#384

Post by justsid »

MaxikCZ wrote: post #266
devilbunny wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aircraft that are designed as gliders are much lighter and thus have much longer glide range than aircraft that aren't. They're so lightweight that they can climb on thermals. A 737 is not going to be able to do that, but a regular glider can't fly at 400 knots.

> thus have much longer glide range Im gonna be a little pedantic, but the weight has surprisingly small effect on glide range, actually none of the weight affect the range directly, its all from secondary effects. The glide is given mainly by drag and lift (so body and wing geometry), correlated to certain speed. The weight isnt in the equation at all. What weight does, is increases the speed in which the aircraft a…

It should also be noted that gliders have crazy aspect ratios. Airliner wings are designed for completely different flight envelopes than gliders, it’s all a game of what you optimize for and what trade offs you are willing and/or required to make.

But of course that doesn’t mean that airliners can’t glide well, the Gimly Glider and Air Transat flight come to mind. But gliders can definitely beat an airliner in terms of performance.

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

#385

Post by PunchyHamster »

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?

Might not be about fuel but about why they even tried instead of diverting earlier.

Might even be 100% done by the book but book needs changing (tho I doubt that, it's not exactly first case of "a lot of bad weather")

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

#386

Post by PunchyHamster »

recursive wrote: post #118
dTal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get that energy back on descent, no?

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

Just as with bikes, it will depend on how slow it is descending. On "right" trajectory engines could technically be basically idle, and you save fuel flying high so it might not be all that huge loss.

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

#387

Post by PunchyHamster »

hencq wrote: post #258
nostrademons wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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). Yeah, as someone who knows next to nothing about airlines, but has seen these t…

> E.g. are there consequences for pilots who cause delays for passengers?

I'd imagine heavily depends on how often that happens vs other pilots on same route. Tho I'd imagine consequences are "here is more training".

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

#388

Post by PunchyHamster »

estebank wrote: post #108
kpmcc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which airlines? I feel like if this is an issue we should be naming names.

RyanAir is famously one of them. Edit: I was recalling articles claiming the company purposely fueling less than other airlines in order to increase their rate of claims for priority landing to have a better "on time" statistics. This forum post disputes that: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/38501/is-it-tru...

also carrying less fuel does save on fuel usage

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

#389

Post by DamnInteresting »

nomilk wrote: post #91

> One pilot who reviewed the log said: “Just imagine that whenever you land with less than 2T (2,000kg) of fuel left you start paying close attention to the situation. Less than 1.5T you are sweating. But (220kg) is as close to a fatal accident as possible.”

Now that is range anxiety.

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

#390

Post by PunchyHamster »

hermannj314 wrote: post #239
MadnessASAP wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second guessing a pilot saying they have a problem is a really bad idea. ATC second guessing an emergency is a really bad idea. Making a pilot explain why they're actually low on fuel, despite whatever some computer is saying, instead of focusing on flying the plane is a really, really bad idea. Also, that sort of telemetry does exist for most major airlines, however it goes via satellite to the airline not the ATC.

I am not saying you are wrong, but both Type I and Type II errors are problematic. What if the pilot is wrong? Korean Air Flight 801 could have used someone 2nd guessing a pilot. They didn't until they were almost dead and then it was too late. Not 2nd guessing the pilot was a really really bad idea.

> Korean Air Flight 801 could have used someone 2nd guessing a pilot.

...yeah, the second pilot. And in this case, also flight engineer.

IIRC The problem was pretty much aside from errors the cultural issues with pilots, the "lower ranks" wouldn't dare to be assertive to seniority and just voiced the issues they saw without doing anything.

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