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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

#571

Post by phyzome »

Schiendelman wrote: post #281
phyzome wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Want to bake your noodle? Because the market responds to your behavior by slightly lowering the cost of flying to fill those seats, demand increases to match from slightly lower income people. Because they then organize their lives slightly more around cheap flights, it gets even harder to lower the impact of flying. Paradoxically, rich people like us (you're a tech worker too...) flying more, because we're less sens…

That might be true within a certain band, but if enough people stop flying, there's only so much elasticity there. Eventually they stop flying as many planes.

(Of course, subsidies probably throw a wrench in all of this.)

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

#572

Post by normie3000 »

janc_ wrote: post #551
normie3000 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many reasons I won't fly Ryanair 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.

Not just adversarial to passengers but to their employees also.

I hadn't heard about this. They can't be having fun if that's the case, caught in between the treatment of their employer and the customers they pay it forward to (for money).

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

#574

Post by ashanoko »

tstrimple wrote: post #422
gsnedders wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, final fuel reserves are typically at least half an hour, and you shouldn't really be cutting into them. What if their first approach into MAN had led to another go around? With a major storm heading north-easterly across the UK, the planning should have reasonably foreseen that an airport 56 miles east may also be unavailable, and should've further diverted prior to that point. They likely used t…

> As others have said, final fuel reserves are typically at least half an hour, and you shouldn't really be cutting into them. This is one of the multiple layers of defense that airlines employ. In theory, no one single failure should cause a major incident because of redundancies and planning. Airlines rely on the "Swiss-cheese" model of safety. Each layer has its own risks and "holes" but by layering enough layers…

[dead]

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

#575

Post by howard941 »

anonymars wrote: post #400
howard941 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but that also doesn't get any energy back on descent, quite the opposite, that is "riding the brakes on your way down"

Well it's not all lost otherwise it'd be a stall spin accident caused by performing the maneuver with too little airspeed. And that's hard to do. It's a noisy maneuver, the air slamming against the fuselage makes itself heard. Once performed it's not easily forgotten.

More dangerous than inadvertently spinning with too little airspeed is the possibility of shock cooling when relying on a forward slip for too much altitude loss. It really does need to be well-controlled.

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

#576

Post by gizajob »

anton001 wrote: post #552
gizajob wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fly with them all the time and never have any kind of issue at all. They offer a good deal, ok there’s a couple of obvious dark patterns in their app and way of doing business but they’re hardly unique in that respect. Feels like getting a fast bus between European cities nowadays.

But these bus companies have also been involved in fatal accidents more than a few times over the past years. Multiple as a result of driver error or no outside involvement from a third party.

Do please give examples of Ryanair fatalities during that time.

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

#577

Post by cyphar »

janc_ wrote: post #553
cyphar wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the SOP for low fuel is that you need to declare a fuel emergency (i.e., "Mayday Mayday Mayday Fuel") one you reach the point where you will land with only reserve fuel left. The point OP was making is that the entire system of fuel planning is designed so that you should never reach the Mayday stage as a result of something you can expect to happen eventually (such as really bad weather). If…

Landing at an alternate location is significantly more expensive, so I assume Ryanair put pressure on its pilots to avoid that…?

We'll find out in the investigation, but "get-there-itis" is a very common condition amongst pilots and can lead to them delaying making decisions (such as going to alternates) so it's possible that this happened without explicit (or implicit) pressure from management.

That being said, the fact that (AFAICS) they first tried to divert to a closer airport where the weather was similar rather than an alternate with clear weather was probably one of the causes of this event.

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

#578

Post by normie3000 »

gizajob wrote: post #576
anton001 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these bus companies have also been involved in fatal accidents more than a few times over the past years. Multiple as a result of driver error or no outside involvement from a third party.

Do please give examples of Ryanair fatalities during that time.

Ryanair the bus company?

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

#579

Post by arielcostas »

dredmorbius wrote: post #301
rappatic wrote: post #136

> 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.

In commercial aviation (passenger/cargo), typically about half the take-off weight is fuel . That's not half the payload weight (pax + cargo + fuel), it's half the takeoff weight. For a medium-range flight (say ~2000 mi / 3200 km) each passenger incurs somewhat more than their own weight in fuel.

I don't think that's correct. The MTOW (Maximum Take-Off Weight) of an A320ceo is 78,000 kg, while the max fuel capacity is approximately 24,210 litres. Using Jet A-1's density of roughly 0.804 kg/L, that's about 19,460 kg of fuel, which represents only 25% of the take-off weight. The OEW (Operating Empty Weight) for that aircraft is approximately 42,600 kg, which means you'd need the fuel to weigh around 35,400 kg for your "half the take-off weight is fuel" claim to be true—nearly double the actual fuel capacity.

Even for a long-range aircraft like the A350-900, with an MTOW of 280,000 kg and a fuel capacity of approximately 138,000 litres (roughly 111,000 kg at 0.804 kg/L), fuel represents about 40% of the take-off weight. The OEW is approximately 155,000 kg, meaning even a completely empty plane (except for crew) loaded with maximum fuel still wouldn't reach your claimed 50% fuel fraction.

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

#580

Post by vrighter »

crmd wrote: post #554
PaulRobinson wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 once had a board member who was also on the board of Ryan Air, and he casually told me a story about when their CEO gave a presentation on adding a credit card -powered interlock on the cabin lavatories. He told them, “They’re my planes and if you have the nerve to shit in them you should have to pay for the cleanup”. My colleague thought he was portraying the CEO as a cool guy and decisive manager, but I thought t…

i heard from an airport employee once that they wanted to keep the airplane started in between flights. This was specifically so they can skip the preflight checks. Thankfully they were not allowed to
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