Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
(theguardian.com)728 points by mazokum 4 days ago
728 points by mazokum 4 days ago
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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 the guy sounds like a sociopath.
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 prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.)
One such hazardous state we have defined in aviation is "less than N minutes of fuel remaining when landing". If an aircraft lands with less than N minutes of fuel on board, it would only have taken bad environmental conditions to make it crash, rather than land. Thus we design commercial aviation so that planes always have N minutes of fuel remaining when landing. If they don't, that's a big deal: they've entered a hazardous state, and we never want to see that. (I don't remember if N is 30 or 45 or 60 but somewhere in that region.)
For another example, one of my children loves playing around cliffs and rocks. Initially he was very keen on promising me that he wouldn't fall down. I explained the difference between accidents and hazardous states to him in childrens' terms, and he realised slowly that he cannot control whether or not he has an accident, so it's a bad idea to promise me that he won't have an accident. What he can control is whether or not bad environmental conditions lead to an accident, and he does that by keeping out of hazardous states. In this case, the hazardous state would be standing less than a child-height within a ledge when there is nobody below ready to catch. He can promise me to avoid that, and that satisfies me a lot more than a promise to not fall.
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.
> Trying to prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.
The reason they had less than 30 minutes of fuel was because the environment wasn't on their side. They started out with a normal amount of reserve and then things went quite badly and the reserve was sufficient but only just.
The question then is, how much of an outlier was this? Was this a perfect storm that only happens once in a century and the thing worse than this that would actually have exhausted the reserve only happens once in ten centuries? Or are planes doing this every Tuesday which would imply that something is very wrong?
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.
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 the majority of their final fuel reserve on the secondary diversion from EDI to MAN, presumably having planned to land at their alternate (EDI) around the time they reached the final fuel reserve.
Any CAA report into this, if there is one produced, is going to be interesting, because there's multiple people having made multiple decisions that led to this.
Suspect they were IFR. All your points stand. First time flying things with a jet engine, I was shocked how much more fuel gets burned at low altitude. It almost always works out better to max climb to altitude and descend than to fly low and level. On a small jet, things can get spicy fast when ATC route you around at 5000' for 15 minutes or so. Three aborted landings would gobble gas like crazy.
§ 91.167 Fuel requirements for flight in IFR conditions.
(a) No person may operate a civil aircraft in IFR conditions unless it carries enough fuel (considering weather reports and forecasts and weather conditions) to—
(1) Complete the flight to the first airport of intended landing;
(2) Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this section, fly from that airport to the alternate airport; and
(3) Fly after that for 45 minutes at normal cruising speed
Just reaching altitude again to make it to the first and later second alternate are mostly likely the biggest factors in the extra fuel consumption. That's very expensive.
> 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 together there should be no clear path between all of the layers. In theory this prevents major incidents and given the commercial airline's safety records I'd say it works pretty fucking well. Landing with minutes of fuel left should be exceptional. But it also shouldn't be fatal or a major risk due to the other layers of the system. ATC will move heaven and earth to land a plane low on fuel or with engine trouble safely. And everyone else in the system having 30+ minutes of extra fuel gives the space for this sort of emergency sorting.
I think this also reflects on the "efficiency" that MBA types bring to companies that they ruin. If an MBA sees a dozen landings with an extra hour of fuel, their mind starts churning at saving money. Surely an hour of extra fuel is too much and just wasted. Wasted because every extra gallon of fuel you take off with is extra weight you have to carry throughout the flight. Surely things would be more efficient if we could make sure planes only carry enough fuel to make their trip with very minimal overhead. And when everything goes perfectly according to plan, these decisions work out fine. Money is saved. Bonuses are paid. But the inevitable always happens. That's why it's called inevitable. Lives are lost. Wrists are slapped. Some people at the bottom lose their jobs. The world moves on.
I thought a lot of airlines had rules to limit the number of attempts you could make at a single airfield in an attempt to prevent this exact kind of situation.
It sounds to me like they tried harder at their intended destination than maybe they should have, followed by going to an alternate airport that probably wasn’t a good choice in the first place, and then having to divert to the final airport where luckily they could land in time.
Interesting. To me it does not really make sense to think in terms of fuel left because, no matter the reserves, there can always be a situation so unlikely, so outside the ordinary, that it will drain all fuel reserves before you make it to the planned destination.
I have no clue how else to think about it though.
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.
This is really helpful and I think I understand now.
The approach is basically “accounting for everything that might go wrong to the best of our experience, including problems arising from the complex interactions between the airplane and supporting ground systems and processes, this is how much fuel you need in the worst case scenario. And now lets add more to give us a cushion, and we will treat consumption of this last reserve as tantamount to a crash.”
Yes, exactly. The day it's normal to eat into the allowance is the day we start seeing planes falling out of sky for lack of fuel again. The only way to prevent that is to treat 30 min of fuel as seriously as you would 0 minutes.
"I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all."
You're confused why they should investigate how everyone on that flight came within minutes of dying?
Something about the fuel reserves, procedures, or execution was clearly flawed.
I think the argument is that this is precisely the tail end of exceptional conditions overfueling is designed for. If it's typical to fill fuel for 4 hours on a 2 hour flight, and the flight took 4 hours. It seems like this is exactly why they overfuel to 4 hours. If this happens once every 100k flights, then it doesn't even beg the question of "why aren't we overfuelling to 4.5 hours".
This is just clarifying the question from the perspective of an outsider.
That said, an investigation would be pretty reasonable, even if only to confirm that the abornamlity were forces majeures
Although credit is due to fuel reserve policies considering they landed after two diversions and three go arounds.
Or did it work as intended? The plane had multiple failed landing attempts, was re-routed, and had enough fuel to land safely. While no one wants to cut it this close, this was not a normal flight.
I’m not an expert in this field, but it would seem that the weight of extra fuel would increase operating costs, so it’s is effectively insurance. How much extra fuel should be carried to account for unplanned events like this, while not carrying so much that it becomes cost prohibitive.
Fuel depletion is risky, but not that risky; see the Gimli Glider for a case much more dangerous than this, which still worked out amazingly well.
Edit: Here is the Wiki on incidents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_starvation_and_fuel_exhau...
Depends if our goal is to have zero aircraft crashes. If the goal is zero, then for any given parameter, you have to define a margin of safety well before crash territory and treat breaching that margin as seriously as if there had been a crash.
Similarly planes are kept 5 nautical miles apart horizontally, and if they get closer than that, you guessed it - investigation. Ofc planes could come within inches and everyone could live, but if we normalize flying within inches, the we are also normalizing zero safety margin, turning small minor inevitable human failings into catastrophe death & destruction. As an example, planes communicate with ATC over the radio and are given explicit instructions - turn left 20 degrees, fly heading 140 etc. From time to time these instructions are misunderstood and have to be corrected. At 5nm separation everyone involved has plenty of time to notice that something was missed/garbled/misinterpreted etc and correct. At 1 inch separation, there's no such time. Any mistake is fatal, even though in theory you are safe when separated by 1 inch.
TBC an investigation doesn't mean investigating the pilots in order to assign blame, it means investigating the entire aviation system that led up to the breach. The pilot's actions / inaction will certainly be part of that, but the goal is to ask, "How could this have been avoided, and ask how every part of the system that we have some control or influence over might have contributed to the outcome"
We shouldn't aim for 0 crashes due to low fuel though. How many deaths does carrying around 3x fuel than what you reasonably need contribute to via extra pollution?
We should aim for 1 every 10-100 years or something reasonable like that.
Well imagine they had to do a go-around on that landing. Go-arounds are extremely normal and might be done for a million reasons; your speed is wrong, your descent rate is wrong, your positioning is wrong, there's bad wind, there's an issue on the ground, etc etc etc. Six minutes of fuel is really not enough to be sure that you can do a go-around. So now, if ANY of those very normal everyday issues occurs, the pilot has to choose between two very bad options: doing a go-around with almost no fuel, or attempting a landing despite the issue. That's just way too close for comfort.
Aviation operates on a Swiss cheese model; the idea is that you want many many layers of safety (slices of cheese). Inevitably, every layer will have some holes, but with enough layers, you should still be safe; there won't be a hole that goes all the way through. In this case, they basically got down to their very last slice of cheese; it was just luck that the last layer held.
>I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
One of the most important aspects of taking safety seriously is that you do not just investigate things which had an impact, but that you proactively investigate near misses (as was the case here) and even potential incidents.
A plane with 6 minutes of fuel left is always a risk to every person on board and potentially others if an emergency landing becomes the only option.
Indeed that is the definition of a "aviation incident" where there was a risk of injury or damage. If there is actual injury or damage it becomes an "accident".
The investigations into incidents aren't usually particularly long or noteworthy and often the corrective action will be to brief X on dangers of Y, or some manner of bulletin distributed to operators.
If you cut into the final reserve, it’s a full-blown emergency requiring a mayday call.
This should not happen. So what’s there to investigate? How it was allowed to happen, and how to prevent it from happening again.
EDIT: it’s a mayday even earlier than that. It’s a mayday once the pilots know that they WILL land with less than the final reserve.
If they have to touch and go, how long would it take until they get the plane around for another approach? In fact, you might not get as far as that touch and go and have to go around. You need some margin for all of these eventualities. The likelihood is low that these happen, but they have to be accounted for.
Sure, but the flight was a lot longer than planed. How much extra do we need. They declared an emergency, and thus put themselves at the front of the line. They had 6 more minutes to do that touch and go around if that happened, and since they were already in a low fuel emergency they get priority and so there is enough time to do that if they needed. (edit - as others have noted, 6 minutes with high error bars, so they could have only had 30 seconds left which is not enough)
They landed safely, that is what is important. There is great cost to have extra fuel on board, you need enough, but it doesn't look to me like more was needed. Unless an investigation determines that this emergency would happen often on that route - even then it seems like they should have been told to land in France or someplace long before they got to their intended destination to discover landing was impossible.
This reminds of discussions following the Fukushima disaster where one commenter claimed that it wasn't a design flaw, because it was an extraordinary circumstance. I found this appalling, because I do not at all think that was the risk profile that was sold to the public; I think people believed that it was supposed to be designed to safely survive 1000-year earthquakes and the tsunamis that they create.
Likewise, I think that the flying public is lead to believe fuel exhaustion is so rare that when airlines are compliant with regulations, no such disasters across all flights across all carriers will occur during your lifetime.
It's also a communication problem, because labels like "100-year/1000-year event" are easily misunderstood.
* they're derived from an estimated probability of the event (independently) happening each year. It doesn't mean that it won't happen for n years. The probability is the same every year.
* the probabilities are estimates, trying to predict extreme outliers. Usually from less than 100s of years of data, using sparse records that may have never recorded a single outlier.
* years = 1/annual_probability ends up giving large time spans for small probabilities. It means that uncertainty between 0.00001% and 0.00002% looks "off by 500 years".
https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/9/16/an-engineers-pe...
I'm sure we can all remember at least one person in any situation who will say something we find memorably awful.
6 min, is empty, 6 min is purely theoretical, 6 min would not clear for ground handling or a test start, or a fuel system check,6 min would not do a go around. will interesting to see if they release info about what the real amount of fuel left is, and an authorative discussion on how much useable flight time was there. did they actualy make the taxi to the terminal?, or run out on the apron?
Yes. There is another comment above making light of the 6 minutes as if another go-around was still an option, that is a ridiculous take. They were going to bring that plane in and land it no matter what on this last run, otherwise they'd crash for sure. 6 minutes may not even be within the margin of readout.
By your logic you need an infinite amount of fuel.
If you define X the amount of fuel you need after you land.
And you say that X needs to be enough to make an emergency landing.
And we define that the amount of fuel required for an emergency landing should cover the amount required for the landing operation while still having X in the tank when landed.
X > X + landing_cost
The plane already had made 3 failed attempt before and was redirected to two different airports.
Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
I don't remember all of the rules off the top of my head, but if you are ever landing with less than 30 minutes of fuel, something has gone seriously wrong. You are required to take off with sufficient fuel to fly to your destination, hold for a period of time, attempt a landing, fly to your alternate, and land all with 30 minutes remaining. If you are ever in a situation where you may not meet these conditions, you are required to divert immediately. In choosing your alternate, you consider weather conditions along with many other factors. This was, without question, a serious emergency.
From the very brief description in the article, I would say they should have diverted to Manchester at least 25 minutes sooner than they did. I will include the GP's caution, however:
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
If you are ever in a situation where you estimate you will land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, you are legally obliged to declare a MAYDAY. One of the few situations where a mayday is legally required.
My understanding is that they shouldn't have spent that much time in the air (not intended as a guess for the cause). The margin is there for situations where you can't land earlier, not the margin for scheduling the landing. There is margin for expected potential delays, they were in the other margin that should never be used except in true emergencies.
Thirty minutes.
If at any point you expect to touch down at the nearest safe airport with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, you are required by regulation to make a mayday call.
Mayday is a term enshrined in law. It is only to be used when people will die if you do not receive help. In the US, calling it inappropriately can be punished with up to 10 years in jail and a $250k fine. It's protected in this way because as soon as you call mayday, in many situations there are actions that must be taken by law or regulation. Other appropriate uses include things like "our plane is on fire" or "our wing just fell off and we can't steer the plane".
As soon as you think you can't land with the fuel reserves you are _required_ to call mayday, other pilots are _required_ to clear the radio for you, and ATC is _required_ to provide any and all supported possible until you're on the ground.
The investigation is not to figure out who to send to jail or something. The investigation is because a flight just came this >< close to having hundreds of people die. That fuel is there as a safety margin, yes. That's how everyone ended up walking off this plane instead of dying as the plane was ripped apart by some trees somewhere. That is good.
But air travel did not become as safe as it with an attitude of "this hasn't killed anyone yet, all good". The fact there was an incursion into the safety margin should not be looked at as "eh, working as intended" but "holy hell we just came this close to disaster, what went wrong that almost killed all these people? how do we stop that happening again?". That is what an investigation will be looking to figure out.
To put it in vaguely IT terms, this is something like... your application has started corrupting its database, but you have _a_ backup copy. On one hand, you can think "eh, we have a backup, that's what it's there for, who cares". On the other you can go "holy shit, any time we need to restore from the backup we narrowly averted disaster... how do we make sure we're not in that situation again?". The former is probably going to lead to irrecoverable data loss eventually. The second will have you addressing problems _before_ they ruin you.
> If at any point you expect to touch down at the nearest safe airport with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, you are required by regulation to make a mayday call.
From the article, they did issue a mayday call, when the closest airport was presumably Edinburgh. Then they flew to Manchester and landed.
If you get shot, but had a bullet proof vest on, and hence didn’t die, technically everything worked as intended.
Personally, I’d still want to figure out why I got shot and work on making sure that didn’t happen again.
Especially if you basically got shot multiple times (for an analogy in this case).
> I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
So because the safety margin still worked while down to near vapors we should conclude there's nothing to learn for the future to reduce the risk of similar incidents?
That's certainly... a take.
I felt like that seems a little long from EDI to MAN (after all, EDI to LHR is typically a flight time of under an hour!), so:
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=4d2256&lat=54.720&lon=-... is the track of this flight.
Went around at EDI at about 19:10Z, landed at about 19:51Z, so about a 41 minute flight.
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.
Whether it can be prevented in the future. Should planes fly with even more reserve fuel? It's possible. Or maybe different ways of selecting alternate landing sites?
It may even be the answer is "no, everything went as well as it possibly could have, and adding more reserve fuel to every flight would be unacceptably wasteful, so oh well", but at a minimum they'll probably recommend even more fuel on certain flights into risky weather.
Imagine you're standing on a balcony and discover that the supports are cracked almost all the way through.
Do you shrug and say, that's why they have a safety factor, everything worked as intended? Or do you say, holy crap, I nearly died, how did this happen?
The purpose of the safety factor is to save you if things go badly wrong. The fact that it did its job doesn't mean things didn't go badly wrong. If you don't address what happened then you no longer have a safety factor.
I think a more insightful answer is how often is it acceptable for the reserves to actually be cut into. If this was happening often, then there’s a likelihood of a future disaster. As it is there is 1 isolated case that still ended with a positive outcome. I think it almost adds support for the current reserve levels to be pretty dialed-in.
Officially: never. Unofficially, a minute or two would be cause for concern and the regulators would most likely be showing an interest. The airline may have a higher margin than the official one. This is exceptional, they were within the margin of error on readout and the pilots must have known that. It's one thing to know you have half an hour of fuel give-or-take in the tank it is another to know that give-or-take you are running on fumes.
Might not be about fuel but about why they even tried instead of diverting earlier.
Might even be 100% done by the book but book needs changing (tho I doubt that, it's not exactly first case of "a lot of bad weather")
Our definition of 'bad weather' is definitely changing as we gather more data.
Besides regular weather (which airliners aim to avoid except during take off and landing) there are many other factors at play here. There are several almanacs that are used for fuel calculations & navigation, they are updated annually.
The fastest jet stream (the aviation equivalent of the trade winds) recorded is north of 400 Kph, having that with you, against you or perpendicular to your flight path will have a substantial influence on fuel consumption and flight duration.
I agree with you that it may well end up with a regulatory change but that's one of many possible outcomes here. I will definitely keep an eye out for the report on this flight's investigation. It is going to make for very educational reading.
> 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.
I dont know but maybe they should have diverted sooner. Maybe an hour into the flight?
At what point should they investigate?
0 minutes?
-1 minutes?
Anything less than 60 minutes would be looked at by the airline, anything less than the legally required amount (30 minutes for a jet of this type iirc) will result in a very serious investigation. Note that for slower aircraft (for instance a turbo-prop) the time requirement goes up not down because they may have to spend more time in the air to reach an alternate (or secondary alternate, if things are really bad, like what happened here).
One of those YouTube channels where a professional pilot evaluates flying incidents had a similar incident when the pilot started yelling at the tower when they tried to make him go around again. He essentially said he would declare an emergency if he didn’t hear different instructions. I think he had 10-15 minutes when he touched down.
One of the things the reserve is for is if the plane immediately in front of you fucks up the runway, you now have to divert to the next airport. You need at least enough fuel to get there and for the tower to shove everyone else out of the way so you can make an emergency landing.
There are other reasons someone could abort a landing and have to go around again, besides debris in the runway. And sometimes two of them can happen consecutively.
In the case I’m referencing, it was pointed out that p the pilot made things worse by going faster than he was told to fly, using up fuel and also making him too close to a previous plane which forced him to go around the previous time, so it wasn’t all the tower.
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.
Since there's a lot of confusion in the comments below I'm going to hijack one of the top comments to make a couple points clear from the article and FlightRadar24 data: [1]
They did reroute earlier. It was 2 failed attempts on Prestwick (Glasgow), 45 minutes in the landing pattern, then they diverted to Edinburgh (15 minute flight), a failed attempt at Edinburgh (~5-10 minutes), and then they diverted to Manchester (45 minute flight) and landed successfully there. Likely they hit their reserve just as the Edinburgh landing failed and decided to fly to Manchester, with clearer skies, rather than risk another failure in their reserve.
IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride). Second, if the Edinburgh landing had been successful they would not have eaten into their reserve and no investigation would've been needed. Third, the Monday-morning quarterbacking could've easily gone the other direction if they had diverted to Manchester ("Why did you choose an airport 178 miles away and risk eating into your fuel reserve when Edinburgh was right there?")
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4
> IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride).
Yeah, as someone who knows next to nothing about airlines, but has seen these type of decisions in businesses, this was the thing that stood out to me. This is all pure speculation of course, but I'd be curious how clear it was that Edinburgh would also have a high risk of being unsuccessful and whether the pilots felt any pressure to try that anyway. E.g. are there consequences for pilots who cause delays for passengers?
> E.g. are there consequences for pilots who cause delays for passengers?
I'd imagine heavily depends on how often that happens vs other pilots on same route. Tho I'd imagine consequences are "here is more training".
Quick note that Preswick is not really Glasgow (35 miles away) and Glasgow has its own airport which presumably was also affected by the same weather so they couldn't divert to that. Between the Scottish lowlands (where they had already tried all the commercial airports) and anywhere else, Manchester is about the closest option.
> IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately.
The decision will have been made based on the forecast weather at Edinburgh prior to the flight (that is used to select a suitable alternate), and the actual reported weather at the time. Both the forecast and actual weather are precisely reported in an aviation weather language ("TAF" and "METAR") and assessed objectively. The investigation will certainly consider if the pilots erred there. Mostly likely the outcome will be that the decision was the correct one given the weather information they had available to them - this is what has been found in similar previous incidents.
To me the 45 minutes in the landing pattern also seems questionable.
At the point they left it, they still had about an hour and 20 minutes of fuel remaining, with an alternate airport 20 minutes away. They had not declared an emergency, so they were in with any other traffic waiting for takeoff and landing. (Which does make me wonder, did any other planes try to land at Prestwick at the time and how did they fair?)
Claiming you're low when you are not is going to cause a major headache for the PIC, they're going to have to write that up and they may well be investigated. If it turns out they were lying they would likely find out that that is a career limiting move and if it happens too often then that too should result in consequences. The main reason is that your fake emergency may cause someone else to have a real one.
RyanAir is famously one of them.
Edit: I was recalling articles claiming the company purposely fueling less than other airlines in order to increase their rate of claims for priority landing to have a better "on time" statistics.
This forum post disputes that: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/38501/is-it-tru...
No way.
Having attended meetings at ICAO I can also tell you many details of various aviation incidents, including their existence, are covered by some secret classification. This fact being disclosed caused most of the attendees to lose all hope in the rest of the proceedings. To their credit the FAA reps on that occasion were by far the most reasonable gov representatives in the room, and the FAA are one of the major voices pushing for greater transparency on it.
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.
Second guessing a pilot saying they have a problem is a really bad idea. ATC second guessing an emergency is a really bad idea. Making a pilot explain why they're actually low on fuel, despite whatever some computer is saying, instead of focusing on flying the plane is a really, really bad idea.
Also, that sort of telemetry does exist for most major airlines, however it goes via satellite to the airline not the ATC.
I expect that they take the pilot's word in case of a rare situation [1] and then make the fill a ton of paparwork to try to solve the main cause and also discourage lies.
[1] In one case someone mixed imperial and metric unix, and instead of $something-kilograms, they put only $something-pounds of fuel.
This incident is known as the Gimli Glider and was actually due to multiple failures before the pound-kilogram issue (and the backdrop of Canada's then-recent metrication) even became relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
"claiming they're low on fuel"
It is almost fascinating how humans will stoop to dishonesty even in banal situations - and not just any humans, but pilots, who should be subject to at least some vetting.
Maybe planes should be retrofitted as to transmit their actual fuel state including a qualified assessment in minutes to the ATC. Not just because of the cheaters, but also to warn the ATC in the rare case that some plane crew isn't very assertive about their dwindling fuel, or hasn't noticed the problem.
It would make prioritizing the queue a bit more neutral.
If I designed such a system from scratch, "remaining fuel" would be part of my telemetry.
>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.
And the reason why those fuel reserves exist is to be a guard band allowing situations like this to happen without flames, wreckage, and death.
Having worked with many US airline pilots over the years, this is also why they are so proud to be unionized. Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers, but the union is also there so that management doesn't get bright ideas about things like cutting fuel reserves to cut costs without the union telling them to stuff it.
Management can't cut fuel reserves, not because the pilots are unionized but because there are some very strict rules about these fuel estimations prior to take off and margins be damned. And those rules are exactly there because otherwise this kind of incident would happen far more frequently. But it's regulation that is the backstop here, not the pilots.
The point is that the unions are there to allow the pilots to advocate for all kinds of safety-of-flight related things like fuel reserves, crew rest, and so forth that management would be happy to cut to save money. And to do so without fear of retaliation.
And if you don't think the airlines would love to lobby Congress about the regulatory backstop, well . . .
Regulations are paper. Who enforces the behaviour, of whether to take off or not, on a windy night in central Italy?
Of course the pilots are the backstop, and the unions are theirs, so they can make necessary calls the money doesn't like.
The union is a nice backstop for issues around the edges that come up with corporate, but the real backstop is the pilots’ licensing. By making them directly responsible for the plane as PIC, it gives them leverage over their employer that few other professions have. AIR-21 gives them significant protection from retaliation and the ASRS is confidential. ALPA helps them navigate that mess if it comes to it, but that’s the real legal backing that pilots have.
Same thing happens with Professional Engineers regardless of whether they are employed or work as independent consultants/firms. They’re legally responsible for the bridges and other infrastructure they sign off on with laws protecting them from employers and clients.
(I fully support the ALPA and other unions, I just don’t think it plays as significant a role in following regulations as you claim)
...that regulation is text in a database. It can be changed capriciously at any moment, like they often are.
It takes people with ideas and a willingness to put pressure in the right places to be sure that sane policies prevail.
I think it's pretty obvious that as time moves forward, we need to rely on "regulations" less. The root and history of the word in the political context is to make things regular. But state actions increasingly bring irregularity to the world.
It seems absolutely fair to say that, in this situation, the people - the pilots in particular, but also cabin crews, ATCs, engineers, and their unions, are the backstop worth observing and celebrating.
> I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
Just watch Juan Browne, he usually turns out pretty good in analyzing the mishaps. He didn’t upload anything for Manchester yet but will probably soon: https://youtube.com/@blancolirio
I remember this stuff being a bigger story for a short moment x years ago, where low cost carriers (it might have been Ryanair then, too) routinely flew with unreasonably small amounts of "backup" fuel and had to declare emergencies in order to get on the ground safely.
I guess they're trying it again now that the whole thing had blown over.
Pretty obviously not the case here if you read the article.
> it shouldn't have happened, no matter what
You hear that a lot, with Ryanair stories.
Sounds like a great airline!
"make speculative statements"
isn't this 99 percent of modern infotainment "journalism" though? making speculative statements, omitting and lying..
3 go arounds + 2 hours in a holding pattern should result in at least 45 to 60 minutes left in the tanks after landing. Depending on the kind of aircraft that can be a pretty impressive amount of fuel.
> Does the estimation change depending on weather forecast, season of the year etc?
Yes. There are many factors that go into this including trade winds (which vary quite a bit seasonally and which can make a huge difference), time of day, altitude of the various legs, route flown, weather, distance to alternates, altitude of the place of departure and altitude of the place where you are landing, weight of the aircraft, engine type, engine hours since last overhaul, weight of passengers, luggage and cargo, angle-of-attack and so on. The software I wrote was a couple of thousand lines just to output a single number and 10x as much code for tests, and it was just one module in a much larger pre-flight application.
The test suite was much larger than the code. It took ages to get it certified, the calculations had to be correct to the last significant digit on reference problems to prove that the algorithms had been implemented correctly. This caused a bit of a headache because the floating point library that I used turned out to be slightly different than the one from the benchmark.
There are three different kinds of jet fuel and all are produced to strict standards, and then there are allowances for ppm water contamination (very low, to ensure the fuel system will never freeze at altitude or in freezing weather on the ground or at lower altitude).
I'm just curious, is this hard on the fuel pumps? I've always been told to not run gas down in your car because the pumps will get hot.
This honestly makes me think that we're missing a trick if an option for this sort of circumstance can't be "send a military fuel tanker up to refuel them in air" as a last ditch emergency measure (which IMO you would've triggered in this exact scenario).
The argument in favor is simply that we need in air refueling for the military, but justifying all that expenditure is a lot easier if it's dual use technology.
const estimateFuel = (distanceInKms, litersPerKm) => distanceInKms * litersPerKm;
I don't even know what I'm talking about, but you at least forgot to account for headwinds and differing drag amounts at different altitudes/speeds.
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 interesting reading. A couple of notes: the wind and the time spent on the three go-arounds + what was necessary to get to the alternate may not be the whole story here, that's actually factored in before you even take off.
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.