511–520 of 586 posts
Ryanair: Cutting cost at all cost
Further, with the baggage being there in easy reach under the seat, I reckon people would be more tempted to take it with them when evacuating.
That they're are a safe airline seems to be incredible luck - they have all the components for it not to be.
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, the…
I swore off them a decade ago when I realised how adversarial their relationship with their passengers is.
Until an accident does happen, I have no doubt they'll trouser a lot of cash.
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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.
I want to write more about this, but it has been a really difficult subject to structure. I gave up halfway through this article, for example, and never published it – I didn't even get around to editing it, so it's mostly bad stream of consciousness stuff: https://entropicthoughts.com/root-cause-analysis-youre-doing... I intend to come back to it some day, but I do not think that day is today.
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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.
I want to write more about this, but it has been a really difficult subject to structure. I gave up halfway through this article, for example, and never published it – I didn't even get around to editing it, so it's mostly bad stream of consciousness stuff: https://entropicthoughts.com/root-cause-analysis-youre-doing... I intend to come back to it some day, but I do not think that day is today.
(Knowing, of course, that it will still be read mainly by engineers. But that's the charm.)
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Context: because of bad weather. But I'm truly surprised (in a bad way) people on the ground couldn't solve the situation earlier. The plane was in an emergency situation for hours , wtf. Also, the airport density in the UK is high, they should have been diverted since before the first attempt, as it has happened to me and thousands of flights every single day around the world.
The incident investigation will surely focus on exactly those things. But: just like shipping aviation is at the mercy of the weather and even though the rules (which are written in plenty of blood) try to anticipate all of the ways in which things go wrong there is a line beyond which you are at risk. I've had one triple go-around in my life and it soured me on flying for a long time afterwards because I have writte…
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I think you meant turboprop there, but the distinction I notice is that one has all propulsive airflow inside the nacelle, and one does not.
Agh. No, I meant turbofan, but I misread your post and actually completely agree with you - turboprobs are not jet engines.
The only real question for the inquiry is how the decision was made to divert to Edinburgh and whether that was a reasonable decision at the time.
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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?
I'm not an aviation expert, but generally in safety engineering, safety buffers are not simply calculated as [normal situation] * [safety factor], but [worst case scenario] * [safety factor] If you ever cut into your safety allowance, you've already fucked up. Your expected design criteria should account for all use cases, nominal or worst-case. The safety factor is there for safety, it is never intended to be used.