Perhaps. If the pilot knows that the ATC can see he's full of it, he might be less likely to lie. Those who still do can be grounded and be moved into management or take up a career in politics.
I’m surprised the “fuel on board” isn’t something communicated via transponder considering previous low fuel emergencies/crashes.
It wouldn’t change anything. The line between a “mayday - fuel emergency” and any other flight waiting for a landing slot is crystal clear. Of course, in low-but-not-emergency fuel scenarios the pilots can request priority, but the ATC don’t have to oblige them.
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?
This one. The reserve is there in the same way that a crash barrier is there on the highway. You really don't ever want to use it, but when you do use it and it ends well you treat it just as seriously as though you would treat a crash.
Perhaps. If the pilot knows that the ATC can see he's full of it, he might be less likely to lie. Those who still do can be grounded and be moved into management or take up a career in politics.
Putting a theory of "you shouldn't trust pilots" into ATC breaks the entire system. It is a system built out of very regulated parts, very professional people, and tight controls. Pilots are encouraged to be very forward and proactive about fuel situations because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052 Minimum fuel requirements are calculated as "Time of fuel for cruise to certain points", which is usual…
> It is a system built out of very regulated parts, very professional people, and tight controls.
also worth mentioning that most of the civil aviation regulations and SOPs regarding commercial flights are written in blood.
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.
Ok. I am impressed with your ability to take such complex subjects and make them plain, you are delivering very high quality here. The subject is absolutely underserved in the industry as far as I'm aware of it, and I would love to have a book that I can hand out to people working on software in critical infrastructure and life sciences that gets them up to speed. The annoying thing is that software skills are values much higher than the ability to accurate model the risks because that is only seen as a function of small choices standing by themselves. A larger, overall approach is what is very often called for and it would help to have a tool in hand to both make that case and to give the counterparty the vocabulary and the required understanding of the subject in order to have a meaningful conversation.
Edit: please post your link from above as a separate submission.
As someone who has ridden a bike up a big hill, and then down it, I don't think you get it back.
This is because bikes cost you about 50% more energy going uphill than walking[1]. You get back everything you don't lose from having to pedal too slowly, hunch over the front wheel, and maintain constant torque on the pedals.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread I actually wrote software to estimate the amount of fuel a jet should load to comply with the rules. This was commissioned by the airline and they were scared shitless that they would ever be found to be in breach of the regulations on this aspect. It is one of those red lines that you really do not wish to cross. There are other aspects of flight where you are right but this parti…
As an aviation fan just reading this thread is quite eye-opening in terms of how much risk tolerance the average commenter has vs what is standard in the aviation community and on aviation forums. It's almost like peeking into two different worlds. I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers. I feel…
The average commenter here is a software guy. I imagine for the average software guy a Master Caution would be like a minor compile-time warning, i.e. feel free to just disregard it. :)
My guess is higher air density means more wind resistance, which acts as negative forward acceleration.
Not just that. Jet engines are efficient at higher speeds because the exhaust of the jet engine is fast . If the plane is going fast as well, that exhaust is more or less stationary relative to the ground. The engine works to exchange the position of the plane with the position of the air in front of it. If the plane is going slow, it's accelerating the air backwards . That's where the work is going, making the engin…
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 e…
You shouldn't tempt fate with a diesel, or any direction injection car for that matter. The high pressure pump will shred itself very quickly as the diesel is used for lubrication.
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?
Similarly naive outsider, but I've read things here and there. My understanding is that they should have declared mayday (emergency) and landed (potentially at another airport, potentially in the middle of nowhere) _way_ before so that when they have landed they still had 30 minutes or more of fuel in the tanks.
Why do people keep insisting on pasting LLM output to HN when every time it happens, it gets downvoted to oblivion? The community clearly doesn't want it. If we wanted to know a computer program's opinion about something, we could ask it ourselves.
I was using it to question that exact stated fuel consumption number without a citation. For hard data (like fuel consumption) getting a value from an LLM isn’t absurd.
It’s fine if you post an actual citation that you might have found through the LLM. Just posting AI slop is worse than useless, though, and also unpleasantly dystopian.