Wardogg
Meat Popsicle
In the cargo hauling world we used to say that the pointy nose guys took off with three emergencies. They had no fuel, were down 2 engines, and those 2 were on fire.
Delta 121 control issue
- Thread starter Wardogg
- Start date
roundout
VNAV monitor
Dump what fuel you had out the leaky side because you didn't refer to a supplemental, then dead stick that ish in to an island airport in the middle of the night.
Air Transat Flight 236 - Wikipedia
BobDDuck
Island Bus Driver
There are checklists that work towards isolating the section that is leaking so you don't dump all your gas.
On the 330 it can basically be coming from one of four places... the engine itself, the nacelle, somewhere up stream in the fuel system, or from a tank itself. Some of those are recoverable and some of them aren't, and depending on the size of the leak you may or may not be able to get the plane on a piece of pavement before you run out of gas.
Lucky the Azores were there. I think the only other suitable patches of land between Newfoundland and the Irish coast are Greenland, Iceland, and maybe the Faroe Islands.Dump what fuel you had out the leaky side because you didn't refer to a supplemental, then dead stick that ish in to an island airport in the middle of the night.
Air Transat Flight 236 - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
///AMG
Well-Known Member
My last "emergency fuel" scenario was ironically just a few days after that engine failure I previously mentioned. And I think it was almost all the same people, trying once again to complete the flight we had been trying to do on that previous flight. Anyway, to answer your question, we were single runway ops at NUW (due to runway resurfacing), and we all planned to bring back a little extra gas just in case......pretty common for a P-3/P-8 to knock the a gear out of battery and require a few minutes to reset. So anyway we fly down to our mission bingo fuel, and head home. Whidbey approach says nothing. First we hear that the field is closed is checking in with tower at 6 miles as I'm accelerating to 350 knots for the overhead. I ask them how long they expect, and they say "unknown". Rather than F around waiting for however long it might take for them to clear the remaining runway, I immediately divert from the pattern and we declare with departure. I'm on a fuel saving bingo profile at that point (though it is really short to PAE), and I can't accept undue delays or vectors for a Boeing test 777X that was working the pattern. We land with enough fuel not to be scared, but we wouldn't have if I didn't declare. We don't let ATC run us out of gas. Fully understand if I am emergency aircraft #5. Like mike said, sometimes the stars just align, and multiple waves of airplanes are all RTB at min fuel, and it happens. Some of our planes are almost emergency fuel on takeoff
ChasenSFO
hen teaser
I know NOT declaring had been a contributing cause to numerous crashes where as declaring will, at worst, get you laughed at on YouTube and pilot forums. Like others said here, if something means I need priority handling from ATC and need to rewrite the parameters of what I can accept (i.e. I need to weave around clouds IFR), then I'd declare an emergency and not think twice. Nothing from any conversation with a pilot or ATC who have been part of an emergency has made me think anything other than it's no big deal to declare if you need to. And it's usually better to do it earlier.
Flying for a company it may be different idk, but I've seen SFO shut down entirely for like 30 mins on a storming 19/19 landing/departing day because one of the SFO ramp controllers and his CFII decided to do RHV-SCK-RHV IFR in a frigging storm with winds aloft 60+ knots. They ended up almost running out of fuel and having to divert to SFO because their ground speed was like 10 knots or something, and SFO held everything as they approached. I'll never forget us being like, "What dumbass is up in this storm? Wait, that kinda sounded like _____ on tower? It can't be ____...". There was even an airliners.net thread about why SFO is shut down so a Cessna 152 can land and why is a 152 up in this horrible weather (only IFR departure from RHV all afternoon). Nothing happened. Not to him, not to the CFII. They heard nothing after. Lol. Except from me, as I called him "Retardo" forever after. No FSDO guy asking why they flew over OAK with a designated GA North Field and picked SFO 19s instead or anything. (They wanted a headwind landing).
If my CFII tried to get me to go up that day, I'd have gotten a new instructor.
Flying for a company it may be different idk, but I've seen SFO shut down entirely for like 30 mins on a storming 19/19 landing/departing day because one of the SFO ramp controllers and his CFII decided to do RHV-SCK-RHV IFR in a frigging storm with winds aloft 60+ knots. They ended up almost running out of fuel and having to divert to SFO because their ground speed was like 10 knots or something, and SFO held everything as they approached. I'll never forget us being like, "What dumbass is up in this storm? Wait, that kinda sounded like _____ on tower? It can't be ____...". There was even an airliners.net thread about why SFO is shut down so a Cessna 152 can land and why is a 152 up in this horrible weather (only IFR departure from RHV all afternoon). Nothing happened. Not to him, not to the CFII. They heard nothing after. Lol. Except from me, as I called him "Retardo" forever after. No FSDO guy asking why they flew over OAK with a designated GA North Field and picked SFO 19s instead or anything. (They wanted a headwind landing).
If my CFII tried to get me to go up that day, I'd have gotten a new instructor.
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FL350
Well-Known Member
What a wild history that captain has. Furloughed from regionals, busted drug smuggling and went to prison for a short period, then continued to become an international airline captain.Dump what fuel you had out the leaky side because you didn't refer to a supplemental, then dead stick that ish in to an island airport in the middle of the night.
Air Transat Flight 236 - Wikipedia
NovemberEcho
Dergs favorite member
I’ve told the story here before but the only fatality I’ve ever had was a Bonanza that went into the trees 1/2 mile short of the runway. He ran out of gas but for whatever reason hemmed and hawed when he first started having an issue and a solid minute or two went by before just saying what the issue was cause now his engine quit. He had first told me he thought he was having oil pressure issues. Has he declared as soon as he was having issues he probsbly would have made the runway without issue. Oh yeah, and he died from smashing his head into the instrument panel because he wasn’t wearing the equipped shoulder harness. Don’t do that.
Fuel exhaustion Accident Beechcraft G36 Bonanza N89SN, Wednesday 18 December 2013
The flight was about 60 miles from the destination airport when the pilot reported a total loss of engine power to air traffic control. The controller provided information on nearby airpo...
asn.flightsafety.org
Stop on in to Minny. We can get you fixed.....
Inverted
mmmmmm wine
That is the big focus in the training world at eskimo this year with regard to cleaning up ETOPS emergency procedures. Pan Pan and mayday. Delete "declaring an emergency" from the lexicon.
But also cancelling an emergency when emergency authority is no longer required.
///AMG
Well-Known Member
I imagine that is 100% true with a non-dod employer. To be fair, we basically told Pakistani and Iraqi ATC to go F themselves on a regular basis, and did what we needed to do since they were so incredibly inept and unwilling to deviate from standard routing or canned procedures. Never flew in freaky deeky land, but i feel like my innate approach would be the same. Which probably wouldn’t be the right answer with my current employer, were we to perhaps, begin service to other parts of Asia. I should probably stick to PHX-PHX-PHX trips
Speaking of fuel starvation...The article says they landed with 20 minutes of fuel remaining due to weather and a diversion. A few questions.
1. Should they have declared sooner? Would doing so have helped them get on the ground quicker?
2. The 787-8 was only flying from Cancun to Manchester. It can easily fly twice that distance. Why didn't it take off with more fuel? Even if legal, why not give oneself more margin?
3. If winds caused them to burn more fuel than anticipated during the flight, why not divert to the Azores or Lisbon to refuel? Why did the crew manage this situation so poorly? If they really only had ~ 20 minutes of fuel left, with ~300 souls on board, this could have quickly become the deadliest commercial aviation disaster in decades.
All of this is assuming the article is correct, of course.
1. Should they have declared sooner? Would doing so have helped them get on the ground quicker?
2. The 787-8 was only flying from Cancun to Manchester. It can easily fly twice that distance. Why didn't it take off with more fuel? Even if legal, why not give oneself more margin?
3. If winds caused them to burn more fuel than anticipated during the flight, why not divert to the Azores or Lisbon to refuel? Why did the crew manage this situation so poorly? If they really only had ~ 20 minutes of fuel left, with ~300 souls on board, this could have quickly become the deadliest commercial aviation disaster in decades.
All of this is assuming the article is correct, of course.
re#2 - planes don't always fill up. take whats needed and extra for alternate....unnecessary weight is unnecessary.
Yes, I know. Fuel is weight and the more fuel you have, the more fuel it takes to carry that excess weight. Still, one would think on a transatlantic crossing, with vast areas where there's not a suitable airport, you'd want a larger safety margin than 1 hour longer than the expected flight time. Got to be a balance between a healthy safety margin and saving a few bucks.
question asked, question answered. I am quite sure they had a safe amount. Had they not it would be a different story
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What would you propose as a "Healthy safety margin"
I don't know enough to provide an informed opinion. I'm not a pilot. As a lay person, 1 hour extra time with half the flight over water doesn't seem like a good idea. A 2 hour margin feels better. There are unplanned things that could happen en route that could significantly increase fuel consumption or decrease available fuel. A fuel leak which happened on an A330 per discussion in this thread. Unexpected elevated tail winds. Emergency decompression requiring continuation at a lower altitude. Unexpected course deviation due to an Icelandic volcano eruption.
At some parts of the Atlantic have options. I don't know how far twin engine planes can be between suitable airports over the Pacific or on Artic Circle routes.
No one has addressed the other questions about what happened here? Did they not declare an emergency soon enough? Why didn't they land and refuel it they realized they had less fuel than expected? Was there a breakdown in awareness or CRM?
What happens if you get to the alternate, it's closed due to an emergency or weather, and you don't have enough fuel to get to a second alternate? Do you make your best ILS landing attempt even if you have to break minimums?
Anyway, the reason I posted this in this thread was wondering if they should have declared sooner. That was my initial question. Thinking about that led my overactive brain to maybe overthink the problem which led to the other questions.