Comment by kylehotchkiss 3 months ago
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/QFA63/history/202501...
This is one of the more remote flights humanity operates. What even are the diversion points on this route, McMurdo airfield?
I'm not an Elon shrill but this seems as an ideal place for SpaceX to be re-entering things as they can choose with minimal damage to ecosystems.
This is an interesting article about what is considered the most remote point on earth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/point-n... A lot of satellite debris is targeted there but of course we cannot expect all space debris to be so controlled and in this case SpaceX went for a region that was quite remote.
But why does SpaceX need so much of that space? It's a massive ocean - drop the satellites somewhere else, or at a time there aren't airlines in the way.
I don't think there are diversion points, you either keep going to destination or turn around. The A380 is rated for ETOPS-330, that's 5hr30min from a diversion airport.
Incase anyone is wondering about ETOPS-N
For example, if an aircraft is rated for ETOPS-180, it means that it is able to fly with full load and just one engine for three hours. [1]
Obviously in this case it 5hours 30 minutes on one engine at full load.
-- Slight edit: Unclear if with a 4 engine its rated with 2 functional or still 1 functional engine.
I believe it's not just that it is able to fly with 1 engine. It's that the probability of a secondary engine failure in that time is below a certain threshold. Most twin engine planes can fly perfectly fine for basically any distance with an engine out, ETOPs provides confidence that the other one won't fail too.
Apparently the acronym can now be read as the blander "ExTended OPerationS", or according to the ICAO all such flights can be referred to as EDTO (Extended Diversion Time Operations", which is less fun to say out loud and loses the joke definition "Engines Turn Or People Swim")
There is a runway (YWKS) on antarctica 'moderately' close to the point where the midpoint of the great circle for that flight is, I'm willing to bet it's used as a diversion point for ETOPS purposes for those flights. It couldn't handle airliners daily, but in an emergency (in summer at least) I bet it could be mobilized just fine.
edit: allegedly YWKS does have a regular A319 service from Australia.
In practice do they normally fly that far between possible landing spots? My understanding is that they try to normally stay within 2 hours of a possible landing spot
Yes they’ll use more fuel than running on all engines. They always load the extra fuel that would be required for the maximum flight time with an engine out.
The extra fuel burn is due to the drag from pushing a non-working engine through the air, and from the rudder deflection to counteract the unequal thrust. It’s less of an issue on a four engine aircraft with a single engine out as they can increase thrust on the remaining engine on the side with the engine out.
Extra fuel burn is also required because a twin engine aircraft with an engine out can’t maintain the normal cruising altitude, and the higher you are the more efficient the engines are.
Thrust can’t be reduced much to save fuel because the speed margins at altitude are quite narrow - if they reduce thrust and therefore airspeed they’ll descend.
It's incredible a 14 hour flight can run with that level of certainty!
>This is one of the more remote flights humanity operates. What even are the diversion points on this route, McMurdo airfield?
The acronym ETOPS is sometimes jokingly expanded to Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim... but, in this case, it is perhaps closer to reality than usual.
In this case the water's probably cold enough nobody would need to swim for long.
> shrill
I suspect you may have meant to say shill instead.
Why is that anyone else's problem besides SpaceX's? Are they going to pay for it?
Why would Qantas have the implicit right to the airspace first? Space travel and air travel are both value-added human activities. I can't see why we would always prioritize air travel (particularly in very remote locations like this) over space travel.
Most flights will never be impacted this way.
You're kidding right? This is space debris. If a Qantas flight crashed into your neighborhood, you know who's responsible right?
It's not space debris, it's the deliberate disposal of the upper stage of the rocket precisely to prevent it from becoming space debris. The time and location of re-entry are planned and controlled. This is not going to crash into your neighborhood (except if you're neighborhood is in certain areas of China, where they they happily dump spent rocket stages on populated areas).
Are international waters in the southern Indian ocean Qantas' neighborhood?
Something with a lot of significant decimal places that are mostly zeroes.
Unfortunately "got hit by space debris in designated NOTAM area" looks bad in headlines.
> What even are the diversion points...
perhaps Diego Garcia
> Is this [SpaceX flight] for the benefit of humanity?
Yes. Much more so than that one weird flight that's "merely profitable for a single company".
> Do we all get a profit sharing check at some point?
Yes, in the form of more space sector jobs, more jobs and economic benefits that come from more kinds of useful stuff being launched to space more often, and eventually - hopefully - more jobs in space and economic benefits coming from that.
That really downplays the amount of collaboration needed to make a flight like this happen. The airplane was designed and built by tons of people in lots of different counties, building on a century of aviation industry knowledge. The amount of work and experience that goes into making a machine that can safely be 5+ hours from a landing site is enormous.
None of that means you're automatically operating it on behalf of humanity or even to the benefit of all humanity.
I know you're not exactly serious, but to answer anyway: McMurdo isn't near this flight path, it's at New Zealand's longitude (so 2000 miles east of Australia) and much farther south. Perth would be the closest airport for almost all of that flight path.
(Your core point is correct, this trajectory is about as remote as SpaceX can possibly get, even if it's near a small number of flights. Let's not extend NIMBYism to space and ban SpaceX from everywhere.)