Allegiant Air Fuel Incident

So the obvious here is the plane did land at the intended airport, but did the pilots finally declare an emergency and the airport open for them to land or did they wait the 20 mins until the airport reopen? I've read many news links and couldn't find an answer.
 
Mark815 said:
This is exactly what fltplan.com does, and I miss that little safety net. I know I've missed important notams, like "Hey why isn't my glideslope working?". It's buried in between ridiculous things like, lights that are out, cranes, equipment outages that I would never care about. When I did my own flight planning any hard IFR weather, critical notams such as runways closures, approaches out of service etc would be in red bold, so no matter how tired I was, it would always catch my attention immediately.
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Ya, I know with my short stint at a 121 carrier, I felt beyond out of the loop with the way the whole dispatching and flight release process works. The flight planning part of flying is probably 90% of your SA for the flight.
 
Derg said:
I would love to have laser printers at the gate.
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Does your Microsoft® Surface® Southernjest Edition™ E;FB not have a "mash finger in hot corner and jiggle charms to accept dispatch paperwork function?" How droll.

(laser printers are expensive, delicate flowers compared to the robust and economical impact printers of yore … the haunchy Midwestern hausfrau of airline IT, if you will)
 
jumping in late on this one. I have seen it twice personally where airshow NOTAMS were not properly disseminated and the last center controller told copy holding instructions. Double checked Sabre and sure enough no NOTAMS for closures listed on the release. I have also seen Sabre use weather that is days old and printed it on a current release.
 
Minuteman said:
Does your Microsoft® Surface® Southernjest Edition™ E;FB not have a "mash finger in hot corner and jiggle charms to accept dispatch paperwork function?" How droll.

(laser printers are expensive, delicate flowers compared to the robust and economical impact printers of yore … the haunchy Midwestern hausfrau of airline IT, if you will)
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Our lasers are endless trouble, @Derg.
 
z987k said:
Ya, I know with my short stint at a 121 carrier, I felt beyond out of the loop with the way the whole dispatching and flight release process works. The flight planning part of flying is probably 90% of your SA for the flight.
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Well I'm not sure who you work for but I'm sure your dispatch office would love for you to come by and see the place. You could almost certainly sit with a dispatcher for an hour or two and see the flight planning process.

And I'll tell you, I often times get the feeling that most pilots don't actually know what it is we do in dispatch.
 
Luigi said:
Well I'm not sure who you work for but I'm sure your dispatch office would love for you to come by and see the place. You could almost certainly sit with a dispatcher for an hour or two and see the flight planning process.

And I'll tell you, I often times get the feeling that most pilots don't actually know what it is we do in dispatch.
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What I'm saying is that as I pilot, I felt out of the loop. I did not have 10% of the information I normally do on flights I plan myself. Don't know where the fixes are, a really good picture of places and terrain I'm flying over, good ideas for other alternates and just the whole BIG picture. A flight release doesn't really give you any of that.
 
Company I work for now uses Bingo Fuel and is in the FOM. It is Fuel to alternate and landing with 8000 pounds of fuel.
 
TomcatG said:
So the obvious here is the plane did land at the intended airport, but did the pilots finally declare an emergency and the airport open for them to land or did they wait the 20 mins until the airport reopen? I've read many news links and couldn't find an answer.
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From the above article:

Allegiant said the pilot made the decision to declare an emergency, allowing the flight to land immediately at Fargo rather than continuing attempts to coordinate a landing, which would have caused the aircraft to begin burning its reserve fuel.
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Vegas TV stations all over this story this morning, especially frothing at the mouth over who was flying the airplane.

Definitely a PR win for Allegiant...or not.
 
ndakcfi said:
What baffles me is how they got into that situation in the first place, since they had to have learned the airport was closed some distance out.

The alternate the controller mentions (GFK) is only 70 miles north of Fargo, so I can't think of a good reason why they apparently decided that spending the time and fuel trying to talk their way into the airport was a better option than just asking ATC "what's the closest alternate?" and diverting before they had no other options. If we assume the crew didn't spend any time trying to talk their way into Fargo (although the tape makes it sound like they did), it then turns into a question of how they managed to dispatch a flight that ended up with less than 20 minutes of fuel at it's destination.

Either way, I'm guessing this isn't the kind of thing the FAA is going to take lightly, and I'm sure Allegiant is frantically trying to pin the entire thing on a dispatcher rather than admit their management seriously screwed up.
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Not a good time for the G4 Dispatchers to have dumped their union...
 
z987k said:
What I'm saying is that as I pilot, I felt out of the loop. I did not have 10% of the information I normally do on flights I plan myself. Don't know where the fixes are, a really good picture of places and terrain I'm flying over, good ideas for other alternates and just the whole BIG picture. A flight release doesn't really give you any of that.
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Having just finished a couple-year stint as a Mission Planner for the U-2 (doing essentially the same duties as a 121 dispatcher), I wholesale agree with this. Unlike in 121, too, I usually had a face-to-face with the pilot who was flying the flight I planned, and the pilots also had a dedicated hour or so well before the flight (usually the day before, but sometimes the morning of) where they went over the plan and the materials I'd produced.
 
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