United 724 "Overburn"

Interesting. So onloading some extra fuel hedge (within reason of course, am not saying top the tanks) isn't tough to do or frowned upon at your shop. That's good.


It's encouraged by the company for us to try and land with an hours worth of fuel remaining if we can (unless we tanker because it was cheaper to tanker and burn vs not) and most guys/gals are good with landing with about an hour and ten minutes of fuel at the destination if the wx is nice but I haven't experienced any company pushback about it personally. The school house definitely talks about the savings of it all and why we should work to attain that goal but they also don't push you to do something you're not comfortable with.

Not sure if any of the other Legacies or Regional's use this but UAL uses analyzed contingency fuel for non convective wx days and convective wx days where there's a sample of hundreds (sometimes a thousand or more) of flights on the same route to the same destination over a certain time frame to help limit the amount of unnecessary tankering that goes on. The basics of it is they use the collective average of how long the delays were (lumped into convective or non convective wx delays) and the dispatchers will add that fuel as ACF fuel for us. The theory behind it is sure, you can take more fuel based upon previous experience and you could have held for another 30 minutes but in most cases the wx or whatever delay would have been such that you would still have probably had to divert anyways. The schoolhouse teaches that they would rather you divert once the planned holding fuel is up vs adding more fuel and holding longer only to divert later. You can see the economics side of that. Personally in my limited experience here the theory makes sense and so far it seems to work but the real test will be this summer to see how well it all works in the real world line ops during the thunderstorm season.
 
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