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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

#501
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, although it depends what the alternate was in the flight plan. It may have been Manchester. Although I think its more likely it was Edinburgh, which in the circumstances was too optimistic. Too much concern about the minimal costs of fuel tankering to add a bit more gas? Or saving time by not refuelling? Ive never flown on Ryanair and dont intend to.

As far as I’ve heard, Ryanair will cut into literally everything (including comfort and decency) for the sake of efficiency – other than safety. Even if they wanted to, they're subject to the same commercial aviation regulations as everybody else. Do you have anything other than this single incident to back up your insinuation that they’re less safe than a full service airline?

I don't know how true this is but I have heard Ryanair will use the absolute legal minimum amount of fuel whenever possible whereas other airlines might fly with a bit more.

In theory though that shouldn't matter because as you say, the legal minimum should really be enough.

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

#502
post #40

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?

> How much fuel should they have landed with?

I think about 30 minutes worth of fuel.

Not knowing their flight plan, it could have been that Edinburgh was the first alternate and Manchester the second alternate.

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

#503
post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states . The equation is hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to preve…

If you haven't done so: please write a book. Aim it towards software professionals in non-regulated industries. I promise to buy 50 to give to all of my software developing colleagues. As for 'N', for turboprops it is 45, for jets it is 30.

[dead]

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

#504

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.

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.

Might be useful for fire crews in an emergency. Maybe have data for souls on board also.

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

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is cutting it way too fine. Either this is true, or this is why there’s a 45 minute reserve requirement. There were three failed landing attempts in two airports prior to the successful landing, and they spent almost as much time attempting to land as the scheduled flight took. Seems like this was exactly the scenario it was designed for?

No, this is what should never happen. I wrote fuel estimation software for cargo 747's and the one thing I would have never ever wanted to read is that an airliner of the company I worked for had landed with too little fuel.

Are there ever situations where running into the reserve would be a good trade off?

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

#506
post #453
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?

In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states . The equation is hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to preve…

That's very enlightening. I'm casually interested in traffic safety and road/junction designs from the perspective of a UK cyclist and there's a lot to be learnt from the safety culture/practices of the aviation industry. I typically think in terms of "safety margins" whilst cycling (e.g. if a driver pulls out of a side road in front of me, how quickly can I avoid them via swerving or brake to avoid a collision). I can imagine that hazardous states can be applied to a lot of the traffic behaviour at junctions.

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I designed such a system from scratch, "remaining fuel" would be part of my telemetry. Careful what you wish for. I'd rather people skip the queue by pretending to be low on fuel than people skip the queue by actually being low on fuel.

You mean that ATC would abuse their position by making planes circle as long as they have some fuel left?

No I mean people would take off with less fuel so that by the time they reach their destination they could skip the queue

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

#508

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…

The context you're missing is that Ryanair have routinely declared fuel emergencies in the past, and it seems an operational tactic - they want to carry less fuel to burn less fuel, and then have to regularly mayday to jump the stack on inbound, saving cash. That's not covered in the article, but you can sure as hell expect the CAA are going to take another look at them and their operations planning.

On this one, they did 3 attempted landings at Prestwick. [Edit: I now see that the third attempt was at EDI] What happened between the first and the second landing that made them think on their second go-around that a third attempt was more likely to succeed than the previous two? Was the wind dying down, or was the captain just feeling a bit braver or stupider? [Edit: I'm still curious as to what information they gathered that landing conditions were significantly different at EDI to make that diversion, given its relatively close and so likely to have similar weather].

Why was their final reserve Manchester when there were literally dozens of closer suitable airports, at least some of which are likely to have had better wind conditions by virtue of lower gusts, or more aligned to runway direction so not dealing with a strong crosswind?

There are many reasons I won't fly Ryanair, but not least because they have been shown over and over again to make reckless planning and operational decisions, and they are fortunate to have not had hull losses as a result. Time is ticking down, variance will catch them one day, and a sad & tragic catastrophe is only a matter of time. People will go to prison as a result, because this pattern of behaviour shows that this isn't "bad luck", it's calculated risk taking with passenger and crew lives to save money.

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

#509
post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’ve heard, Ryanair will cut into literally everything (including comfort and decency) for the sake of efficiency – other than safety. Even if they wanted to, they're subject to the same commercial aviation regulations as everybody else. Do you have anything other than this single incident to back up your insinuation that they’re less safe than a full service airline?

I don't know how true this is but I have heard Ryanair will use the absolute legal minimum amount of fuel whenever possible whereas other airlines might fly with a bit more. In theory though that shouldn't matter because as you say, the legal minimum should really be enough.

That seems like a cost/convenience tradeoff: The implication of only carrying minimum fuel is that the pilots can't hold for long to see if conditions improve and instead have to immediately go for the alternate destination airport.

The consequence of that is everybody ending up in the wrong place, but not in an unsafe way.

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

#510
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't look up the carbon footprint of driving then. That is even higher in comparison to most passenger flights.

The data on https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint disagrees, do you have a source?

It doesn't though. The vast majority of flights are short-haul or long-haul flights and not domestic. This data uses the UK flight data so let's look that up.

Non-Domestic flight passengers: 14,124,617 [1] Domestic flight passengers: 1,455,330 [2]

So you can see that over 90% of all passengers do not fly domestically within the UK. So only the domestic flights emit more CO2 than combustion engine cars, but they are the minority. If you were to look at the US, flights that short probably play even less of a role due to longer distances between cities in the US (in comparison to the UK).

In conclusion the data you provided very much proves my point so thank you for providing the source for my statement yourself.

[1] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813... [2] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813...

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