Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
(theguardian.com)727 points by mazokum 4 days ago
727 points by mazokum 4 days ago
Update: OK, if *Edinburgh* was their alternate and they missed there and were then forced to bugout for Manchester, that's then an example of when reserve is OK to be burned. (The 'slight simplification' I omitted was unpacking how the alternate fuel plays into the process, but here, that was a key part of the series of events.) That's what I get for not reading TFA first :-/
The regs are quite specific on if and when we need an alternate, which is weather dependent, and what your fuel requirements are. And we don't really have the idea of "multiple alternatives", but I guess it's implied by the additional reserve - what us Americans call a reserve or the Europeans call "final reserve". In case you're curious, we use the TAF (termimal area forecast) to determine if we need an alternate, and use a 1,2,3 rule which is 1 hour before and 1 hour after arrival time we need ceilings of at least 2000 ft and 3 statute miles of horizontal visibility.
Er.. and maybe crash and kill yourself, all your passengers and crew and people on the ground.
I'm curious why you did that? It's not a very complicated sequence. The whole point of engaging in a discussion here is to think about the issues raised and offer a point of view while incorporating other perspectives into yours. You've spent your money to bypass the whole intent of this site; akin to you being hungry then sending someone else to a restaurant for you so you can later read their review of the food.
EDIT and you of most of the commenters here, with your industry background, are better placed to offer an opinion!
Thanks, I appreciate it!
Even though I’ve read the entire article, I found it very difficult to mentally visualize and ended up not noticing that there were three destination airports involved.
"Under FAA rules this was a screwup."
Not necessarily. And I get that you've caveated yourself with an edit and a reply etc, but lets assume that you're not hedging for the moment.
They carried required reserves on departure. Multiple approaches thwarted by extreme unforseen weather. They declared Mayday Fuel, which is mandatory under EASA regulations, when reserve fuel use became unnavoidable. They diverted to the nearest suitable airport.
Landing with 220kg is close, but within bounds of a declared fuel emergency.
Crew decision to declare Mayday and divert was proper airmanship, not negligence.
Yes, reserve fuel may not be planned for. But it may be used. It's there for a reason. Your accusation doesn't account for dynamic evolving weather and realtime decision making.
I'm an instrument rated pilot and an advanced ground instructor under FAA and I fly IMC in bad weather as single pilot IFR around the pacific northwest and colorado.
This is the right answer.
Was this good/bad? Idk Room for improvement? Maybe? Clearer direction with the benefit of hindsight? Maybe. but the majority of the sentiment in the responses is coming from people not type rated in a 737.
Generally, if it's legal to take off, we're going.
(Source: am airline captain)
> That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
Is that what happened? That's not in the article, what's the source?
And other comments here are saying the third attempt was in Edinburgh, so they were already trying to land anywhere possible by the third attempt.
At what point are you saying they chose to plan on using reserves when they still had any option for landing without reserves?
> you can never plan on using it
In off-roading, we have a similar rule with 4 wheel drive. You don't use it to go in, you use it to get out.
Similar philosophies but with differences. e.g. FAA reserve requirements is destination + alternate + 45 mins reserve. EASA is destination + alternate + final reserve which is 30 mins holding for jets and 45 mins for pistons IIRC. But in both cases it's that idea of a destination, an alternatite, and additional. And then there's the requirements around whether you need an alternate, etc.
See my comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45541096 [I am expert in CFR 14 Part 121, so I made reference to the regulations I'm qualified to directly speak on.]
I was wondering that too. I've taken it to mean "if this situation had happened in the Americas..." as the most generous interpretation I can make.
Looks like they tried two attempts to land in Prestwick over two hours, then flew to Edinburgh and made one aborted landing, then finally went to Manchester.
What a nerve wracking experience for those pilots. I wonder if on the final attempt they knew they had to force it down no matter what.
Per the FlightRadar24 logs, it looks like only about 45min was wasted over Prestwick, not 2hrs. First approach was around 18:06, and they're breaking off to head for Edinburgh by about 18:51.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.
I don't think we know yet when min fuel was declared. At that point, they will be resequenced. Then we need to know when mayday fuel was declared. It sounds pretty odd, like perhaps there were multiple simultaneous situations and the crew did not have adequate information.
About 5 years ago before ATC recordings became mainstay on YouTube, there was an American pilot that declared an emergency at JFK and very firmly said "we are turning back and landing NOW. Get the aircraft OFF all runways".
He was low in fuel and also frustrated with Kennedy ATC because he declared "minimum fuel" earlier and was still getting vectored around. (I know "minimum fuel" is not an emergency and has a very precise meaning).
They must have been very close to running out. But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I’m guessing that pilot had also been taught the lesson of Avianca 052, which crashed at JFK because the FO / captain did not explicitly declare a fuel emergency.
JFK ATC in particular has an enormous workload with many international flights, combined with direct, even conflictual at times, NY communication style. It puts the onus on the pilot for conveying the message to ATC, rather than ATC for extracting the message from the pilot.
You might be thinking of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQuHnrJu1I
For comparison, this is what can happen when the pilots are not that assertive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052
> But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I'm not sure it was a lesson learned per-se because the captain was merely doing his job as fundamentally defined.
A captain has ultimate responsibility for the aircraft.
However there is a side question in relation to your post...
When you say "declared an emergency" in your post, the more interesting question would be whether it was actually formally declared by the captain (i.e. "MAYDAY") or whether the captain was merely "working with" ATC at a lower level, maybe "PAN" or maybe just informal "prioritised".
If the captain DID declare "MAYDAY" earlier in the timeframe then yes, Kennedy would have a lot to answer for if they were spending excessive time vectoring around.
But if the captain did not formally declare and then came back later and started bossing Kennedy around, that would be a different set of questions, focused on the captain.
The word Mayday is not required to declare an emergency. Pan pan still indicates an emergency. And neither phraseology is required as long as the intent is clear, see https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/atc_html...
In fact, it doesn’t even need to be the pilots who declare an emergency https://hsi.arc.nasa.gov/flightcognition/Publications/non_EA...
> The word Mayday is not required to declare an emergency.
That may be so in the US.
But it is a bad habit to pick up.
Especially if you are an airline pilot and you frequently fly to destinations where English is not the first language.
Or indeed in US airspace where you frequently get international carriers flying in and out.
There is a reason why there is internationally agreed standard phraseology for radio communications.
Everyone learns MAYDAY/PAN and the associated expectations around it (e.g. radio silence etc. etc.)
Not everybody will be able to adequately follow along if you have a long drawn-out waffle discussion over the radio ... "we have a little problem" ... "do you want to declare?" ... "oh wait, standby ...." ...."oh, we're ok for now" ... "oh actually maybe this or that"... yada yada yada.
If its truly an emergency then cut the crap and use the standard phraseology and keep the communications terse.
someone further down found the incident [1] I was referring to. It was 14 years ago, not 5 as I had initially thought. Curious to hear your take on it. Pilot said "if you don't give me this runway, I'm going to declare an emergency..." which I don't think is the most helpful thing to say. But there were definitely many swiss-cheese holes lining up that day.
Assuming it wasn't just luck, it seems impressive they managed to maximize their (landing attempts/fuel reserves) ratio like that.
It is a requirement [1] to land with 45 minutes of fuel remaining, if the pilots go under that, it is considered an incident. As soon as estimated landing fuel goes under the limit, the flight needs to declare an emergency (as was done in this case).
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F... is the US rule, EASA has a similar rule.
> this is cutting it way too fine.
Either this is true, or this is why there’s a 45 minute reserve requirement. There were three failed landing attempts in two airports prior to the successful landing, and they spent almost as much time attempting to land as the scheduled flight took.
Seems like this was exactly the scenario it was designed for?
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 written software to compute the amount of fuel required for a flight and I know how thin the margins are once you fail that third time. I am not going to get ahead of the investigation and speculate but I can think of at least five ways in which this could have happened, and I'm mostly curious about whether the root cause is one of those five or something completely different. Note that until there is weight on the wheels you don't actually know how much fuel remains in the tanks, there always is some uncertainty, to the pilots it may well have looked as if the tanks were already empty while they were still flying the plane. Those people must have been extremely stressed out on that final attempt to land.
That's one conclusion. But don't rule out a lot of other things that may have been a factor, for instance, they may have had a batch of bad fuel, they may have had less fuel to start with than they thought they had (this happens, it shouldn't but it does happen), the fuel indicators may have been off (you only know for sure after touch down), there may have been a leak, an engine may have been burning more than it should have. There are probably many others that I can't think of of the top off my head but there are a lot of reasons why the margins are as large as they are.
> The Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks when it finally landed, according to a picture of what appears to be a handwritten technical log. Pilots who examined the picture said this would be enough for just five or six minutes of flying.
For reference, passenger airlines immediately declare emergency if their planned flight path would put them under 30 minutes of fuel (at least in the US). Landing with 5 minutes remaining of fuel is very atypical
220kg is about 1% of the plane's fuel capacity. They must've had a lot of faith in their fuel probes.
For anyone interested, here is the flight playback:
this one is available - https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/RYR3418/history/2025...
Better links
https://avherald.com/h?article=52dfe5d7&opt=0
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1nzet3a/flight_a_...
Quoted:
Incident: Malta Air B738 at Prestwick, Edinburgh and Manchester on Oct 3rd 2025, landed below minimum fuel By Simon Hradecky, created Sunday, Oct 5th 2025 14:39Z, last updated Friday, Oct 10th 2025 15:02Z
A Malta Air Boeing 737-800 on behalf of Ryanair, registration 9H-QBD performing flight FR-3418 from Pisa (Italy) to Prestwick,SC (UK), was on final approach to Prestwick's runway 20 when the crew went around due to weather. The aircraft entered a hold, then attempted a second approach to runway 20 about 30 minutes after the go around, but again needed to go around. The aircraft again entered a hold, about 10 minutes after entering the hold the crew decided to divert to Edinburgh,SC (UK) where the aircraft joined the final approach to runway 24 about one hour after the first go around but again went around. The aircraft subsequently diverted to Manchester,EN (UK) where the aircraft landed on runway 23R about 110 minutes after the first go around.
On Oct 5th 2025 The Aviation Herald received information that the aircraft landed below minimum fuel with just 220kg fuel (total, 100kg in left and 120 kg in right tank) remaining.
The aircraft returned to service about 13 hours after landing.
On Oct 10th 2025 the AAIB reported the occurrence was rated a serious incident and is being investigated.
A passenger reported after the first go around at Prestwick the crew announced, they would do another attempt to land at Prestwick, then divert to Manchester. Following the second go around the crew however announced they were now diverting to Edinburgh, only after the failed approach to Edinburgh the crew diverted to Manchester.
> 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.
I don’t think that’s so much? A car burns 1 liter to travel 15 kilometer’ish, and carries 4 people.
An airplane burns 40 liters to travel 15 kilometers too (900 kph), but carries 160 people.
That’s about 40x more than the car, so the fuel economy per passenger is about the same.
Of course jet fuel is probably a bit more polluting, but it’s still interesting how close it is.
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.
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 sensitive to price, leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes. If you have more seats from the lower end of the market... you don't have as much flexibility in solutions.
Which is a strong argument for a carbon tax on (fossil) fuels. Indexed to consumption over greenhouse gas emissions targets.
Taxes are one way to make markets internalise externalities.
> leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes
that is politically driven and has nothing to do with whether rich or poor bums are on seats.
Clearly you have thought a lot about carbon reduction, so I have a question for you.
Is a plug in hybrid or EV less polluting if you don’t have rooftop solar?
edit: I think I know the general answer, but I’m splitting hairs comparing a replacement car for an ICE vehicle that I have.
The data on https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint disagrees, do you have a source?
It doesn't though. The vast majority of flights are short-haul or long-haul flights and not domestic. This data uses the UK flight data so let's look that up.
Non-Domestic flight passengers: 14,124,617 [1] Domestic flight passengers: 1,455,330 [2]
So you can see that over 90% of all passengers do not fly domestically within the UK. So only the domestic flights emit more CO2 than combustion engine cars, but they are the minority. If you were to look at the US, flights that short probably play even less of a role due to longer distances between cities in the US (in comparison to the UK).
In conclusion the data you provided very much proves my point so thank you for providing the source for my statement yourself.
[1] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813... [2] https://www.caa.co.uk/Documents/Download/10276/b2eedadb-6813...
Especially crazy considering the 737 is not a particularly large commercial aircraft.
40kg/minute is around 12 gallons (47 liters) of fuel per minute. Meanwhile a 777 burns around 42 gallons (160 liters) per minute. A 747 burns 63 gallons (240 liters) per minute - more than a gallon per second!
And each engine's propellant pumps required 55,000 HP to deliver that propellant.
40kg of fuel per minute is a lot but airplanes carry a lot of people.
Web searches suggest a 737-800 gets about 0.5mpg at cruise. With 189 passengers in a one-class layout that’s 95mpg per passenger. With 162 in a two-class layout that’s 81mpg per passenger.
This is better than a single person in a car but four people in a Prius gets 50mpg * 4 = 200 mpg.
This is what vexes me about the lack of emphasis on highway self-driving. Everyone's obsessed with robo taxis.
An overnight trip that's automated could go at 40 mph and get seriously good gas mileage. I mean man with four people would probably get almost 100 miles per gallon.
And this would eliminate a lot of short-range flights
It should be a lot easier to implement than having to worry about a whole class of problems that robo taxis in cities have
Sounds like a train.
The robo taxi links the last few miles to transit.
I recently travelled from my house in Seattle to my office in SF without ever getting in a car. I walked more in the airport than I did anywhere else.
Home -> Walk 11 min -> Metro Bus -> light rail -> SEA -> SF -> BART -> Walk 2 min to Hotel.
Next time I go down I’m going to take Amtrak. I couldn’t this time because it was full. In 2024 360,000 people rode that route on 730 trips for an average of about 500 people per trip. Looks like Amtrak gets between 0.6 and 2mpg. That’s 300mpg to 1000mpg per person which is better than a Prius’ 200mpg at 40mph.
Seattle to SF is 1019 miles. At 40mph that’s 25 hours, which is an hour slower than the Amtrak schedule.
Look at it (2.5 t/h) by volume (0.82 kg/L): 3 kL/h (790 gal/h) == 50 L/m (13 gal/m) == 830 mL/s (0.9 qt/s), and then divide the total flow rate by 2 for rate per engine.
Or divide the total by the number of passengers (~189) flying to consider effective fuel economy (per passenger) or 13 kg/pax/h or 3.6 g/pax/s.
They must plan to never land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, or about 1.25 t, and I'd say they should never, ever land with less than 15 minutes in their career during a pan/mayday bingo fuel emergency.
Possibly related, but not definite, this apparently has happened before with Ryan Air.
https://avherald.com/h?article=454af355
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/exclusi...
These were not definitive but it did raise concerns due to the budget nature of the airline.
It reminds me of a Transavia flight from Girona to Rotterdam that had to be diverted to Amsterdam back in 2015 (1 attempt at Rotterdam, decided to divert to Amsterdam, then 2 attempts in Amsterdam).
It was a particularly stormy weekend and it turns out from the article that they had 992kg of fuel left:
https://avherald.com/h?article=489d4c3f
Massive respect for pilots and the job they do.
The latest Captains Speaking podcast has an discussion about one of the hosts being in a similar situation: https://youtu.be/5ovlZ221tDQ
Fortunately, the flight left with extra fuel, because it was cheaper to carry excess from the origin airport than to buy it at the destination airport, so reserve fuel wasn't needed, but it was close. Also, there was lots of lightning.
Because the weather is very changeable. You may get a lull in the wind for a couple of mins, enough to land.
I've been on a couple of flights like that. Once where we did two attempts and landed on the 2nd, the other where we did 3 but the had to divert. Other planes were just managing to land in the winds before and after our attempts.
The other problem is (as I found out on that flight) that mass diversions are not good. The airport I diverted to in the UK had dozens of unexpected arrivals, late at night. There wasn't the ground staff to manage this so it took forever to get people off. It then was too full to accept any more landings, so further flights had to get diverted further and further away.
So, if you did a blanket must divert you'd end up with all the diversion airports full (even to flights that could have landed at their original airport) and a much more dangerous situation as your diversions are now in different countries.
Forecasts are based on multiple weather simulation runs.
It's a often good working gamble that you will pick a short period of weather that is within your operational limits.
Commercial pilots don't have "personal limits". It's defined by their airplane and/or companies constraints.
This very recent Mentour documentary is extremely relevant, came to mind immediately. Multiple redirects due to bad weather, extreme "Get-there-itis" and eventually running out of fuel.
Great edutainment if you're feeling in the mood for that. If you're inpatient you can skip to 14 minutes, before that it's just backstory.
I wonder if the pilots considered Newcastle (or Teeside)? The METARs showed favourable weather conditions at Newcastle and many planes landed there that day without issue I believe. Also far closer to Edinburgh than Manchester. I wonder if they thought that Manchester being further south, had a better chance of better weather?
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.
Given it's Ryanair I doubt we will see it, still hope so (Peter works for them)
The headline is about the landing, but the issue here happened at takeoff. There were 100 mph winds at the destination and this was their 4th fallback attempt and their third airport. This flight should never have taken off, the risk of multiple diversions was easily predictable, but the flight took off headed toward an airport in dangerous conditions, got diverted to a second airport that was just as dangerous, then finally to a third where conditions were so bad other flights were being cancelled (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/storm-amy-brings-flight-chaos-2019...) and where it finally landed because it was either land at that airport or land somewhere that is not at all an airport. Once this flight was in the air, disaster was more or less inevitable and we lucked into a narrow eviting window.
This seems to be a case where the error was that the 2nd diversion was to another commercial/passenger airport. The situation after it was determined Edinburgh was a no-go was dire and making it to an airport like Manchester was a luxury they did not have safe fuel for.
> The pilots had been taking passengers from Pisa in Italy to Prestwick in Scotland on Friday evening, but wind speeds of up to 100mph meant they were unable to land.
> After three failed attempts to touch down, the pilots of Ryanair flight FR3418 issued a mayday emergency call and raced to Manchester, where the weather was calmer.
#1 - if Prestwick had wind speeds up to 100mph, then why the h*ll was the airport not closed down?
#2 - if the pilots had experienced conditions that dire during their first two landing attempts at Prestwick, then why the h*ll did they stick around for a third attempt?
EDIT: The article's a big vague, but it seems to have been 2 attempts at Prestwick, then 1 at Edinburgh, then the last-minute "oops, do I really want to die today?" decision to run to Manchester.
Looks like the third attempt was actually in Edinburgh
This one is pretty straightforward so it doesn't need an AAIB report. Failure of pilots to brief destination weather conditions and anticipate proper bingo fuel accordingly. Storms in the area == brief max go arounds, brief alternates, and carry extra fuel. They screwed up by taking unnecessary risks of too many go arounds and barely making an alternate because they didn't play it safe by carrying additional fuel. Take these bold pilots to the chief pilot's office for an uncomfortable conversation without tasty snacks.
United Airlines Flight 173 ran out of fuel while circling Portland International Airport trying to troubleshoot a landing gear. Six more minutes of fuel could have helped the airliner to land in the Columbia river by the airport or belly land on the runway. The captain chose to keep troubleshooting and crashed just 6 miles away from the airport.
Are there any good online databases with fuel level details for individual commercial flights? I've been on a few flights that had to circle for a long time / had a number of go-round attempts, and I've never been able to find details after the fact about how close to the margins we were.
Airline captain here.
We definitely involve the dispatcher in the diversion decision. Especially if it's an unplanned diversion, where the big-picture view the dispatcher has is very useful for us in our metal tube.
Sure, company dispatchers are usually part of the conversation, and in non-emergency diversions (i.e. the vast majority), they may suggest specific airports that would be more convenient for company logistics. But the final decision is always the pilots' - and once they've declared an emergency, more or less every single airfield, including military, becomes available to them.
Unless they are in an emergency and are busy with aviating, they will coordinate with their dispatcher on diverting, even if only to verify that the weather at the intended alternate is still favorable. Per the FAA regulations, the PIC and the dispatcher have joint operational control over the flight. Of course, at the end of the day, only the pilots have their hands on the controls, so they can make the plane do what they want—but from a legal standpoint, the dispatcher and pilot-in-command have equal & shared responsibility for the safe operation of the flight.
I realize this is a UK carrier and was operating in the EU/UK, but for the most part, the rest of the world uses the US legal framework for aviation as a boilerplate for their own civil code. Yes, there are some differences, but these are usually minor and more of "differences in quantity" rather than "differences in kind". [Since the airplane was invented here the US had a head start on regulating civil aviation.]
This happened in my country with I think a Vistara flight, where they had 5 minutes of fuel left.
I myself went from Bangalore to Delhi a couple of weeks back, and the poor pilots told the air hostesses at least twice or thrice to prepare for landing but the plane did not land until much much later.
Had a 1 maybe 1.5h holding pattern in Oslo once in Ryanair where they hoped they could land in extreme snow. Then diverted in the end (surprise!). Happened in 2009 though. Joked they were very desperate to land at Oslo because they cant afford to divert.
And that is how fuel reservoir requirements rise for all. Im sure, the whole airline industry is looking at the whole markets share prices going down- writing happy songs and packing gift baskets for Ryanair.
Air + fuel explodes just fine. You really don't want to crash an airliner. At landing speed the number of people dead will still be > 0 and the remainder has a good chance of being injured seriously.
For instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951
This happened at landing speed (the airport is only a few hundred meters from the crash site) and the plane was at the end of its flight from Turkey, it did not catch fire. Still, 9 people perished and the remainder were all but one injured 11 of them seriously.
Dunno about "only" ... 99.99998% of flights kill 0% of their passengers. Even if "just" one passenger dies in an incident, your flight is already in the 0.00002th percentile for safety, very bad!
Yes, even though that is a harsh conclusion to make and for the families involved of course it doesn't matter at all. But as these come this was bad but still not nearly as bad as it could have been. They were about to cross one of the busiest highways in NL, another 100 meters and it would have been an entirely different story. The field they landed in is in the Haarlemmermeerpolder, so clay and it had just been plowed.
that was equipment failure crew had to fight it, not something predictable like running out of fuel
> and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
This[1] kind of crash landing is very rare (in that case there was no fire despite being immediately after take off, perhaps because of the cold). Normally an outcome like this is only reasonable to expect if you actually reach a runway despite being out of fuel. Like Gimli[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_System_F...
Well there'd probably be a fire but not a sustained fire which would improve survivability.
Guess which airline I won't be flying with next time...
Yup. They also popularised excessive baggage under the seat, and I routinely used to see obvious hazards that would impede an evacuation. Staff would turn a blind eye. Probably still do
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.
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 empty on my car, you definitely have a ways you can drive still. I feel comfortable driving about 30+ miles, and it's never died on me. That puts it at no more than 1 gallon of fuel left in the car based on my experience (not scientific I know, but I've owned 2 of these cars, with about 190k total driven miles). It's a lot less than 10 liters from E to Dead on the roadside.
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.
probably depends between cars. on my old civic fuel light is ~5L/1.3 gallons
It's more like
* enough reserve to waste some in traffic. On top of that * enough reserve to find gas station. On top of that * enough reserve to drive to neighbouring city for gas station. On top of that * enough to cruise 30 minutes around that neighbouring city looking for other gas station in case the previous ones were closed. On top of that * enough station to run around parking lot looking for space to park
Sounds like pilot error - they didn't pay the extra fee to have reserve fuel.
I imagine the next step will be RyanAir asking passengers to carry fuel cans onto the plane. B*tards.
Between overworked, understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots, I'm expecting some major disasters in the coming years.
One of the problems with modern internet discourse is there is an implicit assumption that the problem of one country is automatically the problem of another country.
I've never heard of any of these problems with RyanAir. They treat you as less than cattle and generally their service is shit, but I'm not aware of RyanAir being unsafe.
Actually, in a quick check it seems the total fatality count for RyanAir is zero, with only two (on-fatal) major incidents (2008, 2021). That's seems a pretty good track record considering the amount of flights they do.
Yeah there's a lot of hatred of Ryanair given their somewhat pugnacious attitude. But as far as I know they don't mess around when it comes to safety.
> Between overworked, understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots, I'm expecting some major disasters in the coming years.
Maybe in the US, but this story is based in Europe, each country maintains a regulated standard and there are no EU wide disruptions that have ever happened to the best of my knowledge. Also Ryanair don't travel transatlantic flights.
Three weeks ago in Nice, France it was a fraction of a second away from two A320s crashing [0] and possibly hundreds of deaths, similar to Tenerife disaster [1].
Investigation is ongoing and many factors are at play (bad weather, extra work for ATC due to that, confusing lighting of runways etc) but also, from French media reports, there used to be 15 people per shift 5y ago in Nice ATC, now there are just 12, and traffic is higher.
Many people left the profession during Covid and haven't been replaced.
Mistakes and disasters happen, unfortunately the safety we have while flying today has been written in blood, but there is no major understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots in general as mentioned.
15 down to 12 in 5 years with more traffic is not out of the question with advancements in technology but of course, if there is a report that shows understaffing then absolutely it should be addressed straight away and it will be, by the French government.
Ryanair does use low-hour fresh-out-of-training pilots though. Certainly not the only airline that does that either.
I mean, the US also hasn't had any widespread waves of disruptions that led to incidents or flight problems. Same as the EU. American flights and airspace are usually safer too, statistically speaking.
Why? Is ATC a problem in other countries than the US? Are they also under training pilots? If anything RyanAir with its flamboyant history of cost cutting (CEO always threatening to charge for use of the onboard lavatory) seems a more likely source than the flying infrastructure itself.
Ryanair has a very good safety history, among the highest in the world.
They make outrageous claims for publicity, and their customer experience is all about hidden extras and "gotcha" pricing, but I don't think they fuck around when it comes to safety.
They know that with their reputation they would be sunk if they did have a major incident.
It's both true that Ryanair has very good safety record, and that in the past there were incidents with them landing on low fuel.
https://www.eurocockpit.eu/news/mayday-mayday-wins-over-ryan...
> In 2012 and 2013 “Brandpunt Reporter” broadcasted a two episode TV investigation in which Ryanair pilots, speaking anonymously, raised concerns about the airline’s fuel policies and company culture. The pilots revealed that the company may be exerting pressure on them to minimize the amount of fuel they take on board – a practice which limits significantly the fuel costs for the company but could jeopardise safety in certain circumstances. The direct reasons for this broadcast were 3 emergency landings of Ryanair aircraft in Valencia Spain on the 26 July 2012, within a short timeframe due to low fuel levels.
What indication is there that our pilots are undertrained?
I am just a PPL, and that was not an easy thing to accomplish (most pilots complete 50% more hours than required before they are able to pass that test), but my impression is that western training standards for commercial pilots are incredibly high, and the safety record seems to back that up.
In the US, I think that's probably true especially using hours as a proxy for training.
The EU has shown us that you can safely have far fewer hours.
As a pilot I do think that nothing replaces butt in seat, but I also think that 1500 hours of instructing/aerial surveying/hour building is well into the diminished marginal returns area.
Pilots are ultimately the ones who are responsible for when and where to land, when to divert, and how much fuel to take along.
In this case, they likely had adequate fuel for, the usual eventualities but the weather in Scotland was particularly bad that night across the whole country (source: I live near Prestwick airport).
Either Edinburgh (on the east coast) or Prestwick (on the west coast) are ok (one or the other or both) but in this case neither was suitable so the nearest was Manchester - definitely an edge-case.
I don't know how much fuel they had, or if they could've fitted any more on the plane but it was unusual circumstances.
There was a military plane right behind it with the same issue that night too.
Closely followed by the ritual lampooning of some senior middle managers who by the fish-in-barrel method were discovered to not be doing very much.
Story time, from my past.
Waiting on full flight in Europe, good airport, for take off. Pilot says over speaker : " We are delayed becuase FUEL guy got UPSET on tarmac and has QUIT. We know need someone ELSE to fill the plane with FUEL. " Said in a COMPLETELY nonchalant voice.
Immediately I get concerned, try not to think what cause a FUEL TECH to QUIT regarding THIS PLANE and fuel issue. Just close my eyes, relax.
2 minutes later pilot comes on intercom again "For some WEIRD reason, someone wants to get off the plane. Now we have to wait for ground crew to find his suitcasebecause of rules. How annoying.."
Plane waits for an hour on tarmac for BOTH passenger to get off and for FUEL to be finally "resolved".
Arrive eventually at destination.
Most of the trouble would have been avoided if the pilot had not sounded nonchalant about a "NON ISSUE about FUEL that a technician just QUIT OVER". I swear i even rememebr saying the statement with a hint of humour, like what on earth is the problem.
This is a true story, and the fact this incompetence happened to me, well I wouldnt have believed it otherwise.
I imagine everyone involved know that they are doing dangerous things, not taking a drop more fuel than is legally required for profit, knowing that none of that is going to change unless there is a major accident... They keep[1] landing these planes with X minutes of fuel left, but it doesn't do anything, until some plane falls from the sky with 0 minutes of fuel left then everyone knew all along and the rules are changed and nobody is held accountable.
lacking fuel in plane that has not started flying isn't exactly something that should stress anyone and most definitely non issue
Under FAA rules this was a screwup. [edit: see my own reply] (However, the rules are subtle, so they can be partially forgiven.) However, I'm not only a dispatcher but also a philosophy BA, so I've found a good way to explain it.
Your reserve fuel (the "extra" fuel over what the actual flight burn) can of course be used (hello, that's what it's there for) but—and here's the rub—you can never plan on using it.
That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
You may only dip into your reserve when you have no other choice. In this case, when the only fuel they had left was reserve, they are obligated by law to proceed to the alternate airport, which clearly they did not do [correction: they did do the proper thing; see my 2nd reply below]. No bueno.
[this is a slight simplification (minor details omitted for brevity) but the kernel of the issue is properly described]