Bingo fuel, PWAK emergency divert.

BravoHotel

BravoHotel

Well-Known Member
We fulfilled one of our roles in this existence last night. We handled an emergency divert of a P-3 whose head winds decidedly were not in their favour. The aircraft landed with out further incident. The flight crew were happy to be on solid ground as they had less than 8,000 pounds of gas left onboard. The crew RONed, fortunately for them our bar Drifter's Reef was open, we had a movie going and everything went surprisingly smooth. This is one of the reasons why we're here.
 
Thats awesome. What type of plane was it? 8000 sounds like a lot.. But then again what do i know?
 
Yeah wtf.....I can't imagine that their fuel burn is that crazy. In my low bypass turbofan jet, emergency fuel is landing with less than 1500 lbs
 
Apparently it was not enough to get them to their destination. Given the fact there are MMFO between us and other places, puts how little 8,000 pounds of gas is in perspective.
 
Fair enough, just saying that not getting to your destination and diverting for wx/etc with over an hour of fuel left is not exactly an emergency.....pretty much standard cross country ops. That and the p-3 guys routinely shut down 2 motors while on station to conserve gas, so I doubt the 4500-6000 pph number is representative of all situations. Either way, I'm sure they were glad to have somewhere to land
 
Hawks said:
We were informed by Oakland Center the AC did declare a low fuel emergency.
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Sorry, don't get me wrong.....not doubting your story at all. I can see how that kind of fuel could be an emergency out there in the middle of nowhere, but man, they must have really botched both the flight planning, as well as their real-time assessment of fuel en route if they landed at Wake with only a bit over an hour of fuel left.
 
///AMG said:
Sorry, don't get me wrong.....not doubting your story at all. I can see how that kind of fuel could be an emergency out there in the middle of nowhere, but man, they must have really botched both the flight planning, as well as their real-time assessment of fuel en route if they landed at Wake with only a bit over an hour of fuel left.
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Maybe they were a little less then halfway between wake and HNL when they punted?
 
boondr said:
Maybe they were a little less then halfway between wake and HNL when they punted?
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Could be. Wake is like half way to/from anywhere, so that means that somehow, they over-estimated their fuel by almost 50%. I say this because I'm relatively sure that the extra hour or so of gas they eventually landed with probably doesn't buy them much more than a couple-three hundred extra miles in the P-3 if flying at a max range speed, so I'll round it off here and say they ended up essentially only having enough fuel to get to Wake given the vast distances involved overall. What they landed with is just a tiny bit more than OPNAV required fuel reserves (though that admittedly means very little at a place out in the middle of the ocean). I've seen more ( :) ) or less ( :( ) fuel than planned many times once I get airborne, but never by anywhere near that much.....and that is normally planning for worst case winds. But yes, it could have become apparent beyond the half way point if they sort of had their heads up their rears for the first half of the flight.
 
Some additional details:

Aircraft was en-route from PHIK to PGUA. The winds aloft used by a certain flight planning software were different from actual. The software calculated the recommended fuel load base on that data, that was the fuel load used. The aircraft was well past PWAK before it was calculated they would not make PGUA when the crew declared, and diverted to PWAK.
 
Yeah not trying to poo on them....everyone makes mistakes. That said, it's a pretty good idea to be generally familiar with what your aircraft can do and what it cant do, given a fuel load and the winds that are on the -1 (or whatever product they were using). JMPS and/or PFPS are great tools for doing quick flight planning, but you have to sanity check it....the whole garbage in/garbage out deal. I'm not a P-3 guy, so I can't QB their thought process, but in my aircraft, I know generally without crunching numbers how far I can get with calm winds, with a strong headwind, or with a lot of draggy stuff hanging off the wings. These aren't estimates that I would bet my wings on for flight planning purposes, but they are estimates that can tell me if the fuel plan I generate is absolute garbage or if it seems reasonable. That all said, it sounds like the over-estimate was not nearly as bad as it appeared from the OP, so maybe not something that they would have been able to notice until they had been airborne for a while. Either way, they made a good decision, saved the airplane, saved their wings/etc, and lived to fly another day so that sounds all good to me.
 
I blame the guy wearing these wings:

NFO-Wings.jpg
 
MikeD said:
I blame the guy wearing these wings:

View attachment 22401
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I know you jest, but in reality it takes dual anchor types going to the P-3 only about 6 months to get through flight school, and then only a few months more to get to the fleet. I can't remember if they get their wings at the RAG, or if it isn't until later in the fleet, but they are very inexperienced compared to the rest of the guys coming from the other RAGs....NFO or otherwise. I'm not saying anything about them, as I'm sure the "man" has determined that this route gets them to place they need to be at that point, but a few months in the trunk of a T-6 and then a few P-3 sims and some warm-body flights seems like it would give one a pretty small bag of tricks and an even smaller understanding of and real world experience with the business when they get out there to cold grey fleet iron that doesn't give a ** that they are still learning. Then again, they aren't driving the bus at that point so probably not a big deal. I just remember where I was after my first year of civilian flying, and then much later after my first year of mil flying, and in neither case was I really very competent in terms of the big picture and the expectations that this line of work has of you. Luckily for me, I had 2 1/2 more years of being a student in one way or another (SNA and later RAG RP) to get to that point. I can't help but think that they get short-changed a little bit compared to the rest of us.
 
///AMG said:
I know you jest, but in reality it takes dual anchor types going to the P-3 only about 6 months to get through flight school, and then only a few months more to get to the fleet.
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It's funny you mention that, because I was just in Florida doing a joint training op with some of our P-3 bretheren in my organization, and there was one guy who is an Air Officer on the planes who had been a former NFO on E-2s. Was on E-2Bs and went through AOCS in 1978 or 79, or thereabouts. In casual conversation, I also asked him about the training pipeline he went through, and he was saying that most of the basic academic training was in AOCS, then after graduation it was right to the E-2 RAG, with a very short amount of months from graduation of AOCS, to getting winged as an NFO at that time back then.
 
Hawks said:
The crew RONed, fortunately for them our bar Drifter's Reef was open, we had a movie going and everything went surprisingly smooth. This is one of the reasons why we're here.
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How many "rules" did they break and buy rounds? I don't remember much of the night I spent there on a coronet way back when.
 
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