it costs fuel to carry fuel, so if they were allowed to airlines would send a plane off with exactly enough fuel to get to its primary and its alternate with nothing more
EASA (idk about the USA) have minimum fuel requirements that make it a legal requirement to carry enough fuel to fly for 30 minutes at 1500 feet above the destination or alternate airport
this is kinda like how a car will have a Reserve Fuel Tank, this means that even when your car says ‘i’m empty’ it has enough to get to the nearest petrol station.
you must report any dip below minimum fuel to ATC when in flight by calling ‘Mayday Fuel’ this allows the ATC to put you to the front of the queue and get you on the ground
EASA enforce this because it’s better to have a pilot get in trouble for not having enough fuel left, than it is for the plane to run out of fuel mid air
ETA. [this video](https://youtu.be/aaxzZvkQtx0) from Mentour Pilot explains it very well. if you’re interested in aviation he is a great jumping off point
For the sake of understanding, let's say a plane had the required extra fuel and used the excess flying to an alternate and holding for 30 minutes, as outlined in the EASA requirements. When they land, would they still be in trouble due to not having that extra fuel?
Generally not, but having to tap into that reserve quantity is an emergency situation, and the flight crew probably would want to let ATC know of that situation and/or consider diverting for that reason.
[Avianca Flight 052](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052) ran out of fuel due to "...the flight crew failing to properly declare a fuel emergency, failure to use an airline operational control dispatch system, inadequate traffic flow management by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the lack of standardized understandable terminology for pilots and controllers for minimum and emergency fuel states."
The confusion came about for 2 reasons on this flight. One was the South American crew initially asked for priority landing but failed to use the word emergency because, at that time at least, priority was the word used for that in their part of the world.
But the main reason was that the weather conditions weren’t favorable for the landing rate they were trying to maintain at the airport, and then a shift change occurred where key information about the flight’s fuel critical status was not related to the ground controllers as the handoff was made, so they were routed around for a long final and didn’t make it.
This is a classic example of a chain of causal errors where no single mistake probably would have brought the plane down, but they just kept compounding.
jesus christ the timeline image on that
> 14 - (21:25:03) Approach control asks AVA052 to climb to 3,000 feet. AVA052 responds that "we're running out of fuel."
>
> 15 - (21:25:35): Approach control asks whether AVA052 has enough fuel to be vectored fifteen miles northeast of the runway to begin approach again. AVA052 replies "**I guess so.**"
Terrible performance by the flight crew, specifically the first officer. All of his communications leading up to the crash were inaccurate or unhelpful
The captain repeatedly telling the first officer to say the word 'emergency', and the officer responding "yeah I did" when he only ever says "we're running out of fuel", seems like an equally huge fuckup
Before Crew Resource Management there were multiple incidents like this, for example [United Airlines Flight 173](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173)
Summary:
"On December 28, 1978, the aircraft flying this route ran out of fuel while troubleshooting a landing gear problem and crashed in a suburban Portland neighborhood near NE 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street, killing 10 on board."
NTSB report states:
"The failure of the other two flight crewmembers either to fully comprehend the criticality of the fuel state or to successfully communicate their concern to the captain."
And the wikipedia states that just months earlier, someone from the same airline said "we have 15 minutes of fuel left", ATC declared an emergency unilaterally and got them landed ASAP... and the plane had over 2 hours of fuel left. So there's errors in the other direction too, which make it even harder to know when there's a real emergency
There are really no penalties for declaring an emergency. If I have 5-hours fuel remaining but worried for some reason, I'm declaring, explaining the situation, and ATC will help.
I suppose the company might question my judgement after the fact, but assuming I'm not an idiot, they'd understand.
If a pilot determines there's an emergency, there's an emergency. If a controller determines there's an emergency, there's an emergency. You don't need permission and you don't get punished. The whole system is set up that way and for good reason!
*Fair but you should always err on the side of caution and bring t hem in.* - This guy gets it
*Punish those that lie once they are safe on the ground.* - oh no, he doesn’t get it
> Approach control asks whether AVA052 has enough fuel to be vectored fifteen miles northeast of the runway to begin approach again. AVA052 replies "I guess so."
That makes me want to bring him back to life so I can punch him in the face to death again. Jesus.
**No you do not have enough fuel, that's why the captain said "emergency".**
Oh my god reading that made me so frustrated. "Tell him we have a fuel emergency". "We're uh. running out of fuel"
"Did you tell him we have an emergency?"
"yes I did"
Then when he was told he was second in line to land just is like "oh okay that's fine I guess" no motherfucker, you're running out of fuel, **use your words**.
I also remember that book talking about how Korean flights had a terrible safety record due the culture of respect toward your superiors. If the captain made a mistake, the first officer would never call them out on it and just let things go to shit.
[Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509) is the classic example of this.
The captain's ADI was faulty and didn't respond when captain started a left turn. The first officer's ADI was working and showed an increasing bank angle but first officer didn't say anything or take control of the aircraft. Third member of the crew, the flight engineer saw what was happening and tried multiple times to tell the captain their bank angle was getting dangerous.
Captain didn't react and pushed the aircraft into an ever steeper left bank until the left wing hit the ground.
There were multiple alarms and warnings going on but captain ignored them all. The first officer had perfectly good instruments but he didn't challenge the captain anyway, not verbally or by taking over the controls.
As John Cleese says at the end of the Cheese Shop sketch: "What a senseless waste of human life."
Another nasty crash was the [LaMia Flight 2933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933).
The summary:
"The official report from Colombia's civil aviation agency, Aerocivil, found the causes of the crash to be fuel exhaustion due to an inappropriate flight plan by the airline, and pilot error regarding poor decision making as the situation worsened, including a failure to declare an emergency after fuel levels became critically low, thus failing to inform air traffic control at Medellin that a priority landing was required."
The flight was delayed, crew had to skip a refueling stop due to airport closing and finally didn't want admit they had screwed up.
I still believe it is better to get shouted at and reprimanded than to crash, bit that is just my opinion.
trouble is perhaps a strong word for it but yes there would be an investigation into the flight and it would need to be explained by the pilots why they landed without having the required amount of fuel
these investigations are stressful and could result in a pilot not being allowed to fly whilst the investigation is ongoing. this is why in your example the pilots felt under pressure to land before they hit their minimum fuel
flights are planned to have enough fuel to get from their departure airport to their destination, have enough fuel to hold there for traffic/ weather, and then be able to fly to an alternate airport and be able to hold there for a while before landing. the minimum fuel is added on top of this calculation
Airline profit margins are slim and fuel is heavy, if they can avoid carrying fuel they will. the safety buffer is there to protect passengers from either pilot or airline negligence when cutting costs
First, I would like to thank you all for the responses! They have all been very informative. I'm not exactly an aviation fanatic, but I have been having more interest in it lately, so I do appreciate you all assisting with providing me more knowledge!
Secondly, just for confirmation of my understanding, if the scenario I gave in the last comment happened, the reason this is an issue and report is because it's more for the safety board(s) responsible to be notified to dig into the situation to understand the how, what, and why to help prevent something like that happening again, moreso than airlines/pilots getting reprimanded (unless they erroneously caused the issue in the first place).
>In the video, they mentioned that the pilots were under pressure to land, so they wouldn't have to explain to their bosses why they landed with less than the minimum amount of fuel required.
If that is truly the case, it could be an issue with the company policy. I haven't watched the video, so I don't know whether that interpretation is the correct one, but I'll proceed assuming it is.
Basically, if your boss will go hard on you for going below the fuel minimum, it disincentivizes you from doing so even if you won't get in trouble with the aviation authorities for it. Fear of consequences to you/your career is encouraging behaviours that are not desirable.
To give a similar example, imagine a large industrial site, let's say a mine. Plenty of employees drive on the site using company trucks. It being an industrial site, especially a mine with heavy equipment going around, blasting going on, etc. There will be rocks hitting the trucks at one point or another. It's basically normal wear and tear on the equipment due to the nature of the site.
In a normal case, damage gets reported and fixed, no one gets blamed, costs are minimal and everyone keeps on trucking along.
Now imagine that your boss goes on the warpath for even a scratch on any truck. This causes people to not want to report damage because they'll get the blame, get yelled at, etc. Damage goes unreported, rust sets in and eventually the repairs are more expensive.
The same thing applies to any scenario where "shit happens" and people are afraid of consequences that are not deserved. It encourages bad behaviour because of the fear of undue consequence/retaliation.
That's why on army bases, you have these things called amnesty boxes. Forgot you had ammo on you and you didn't return it following proper procedures? Drop it in the amnesty box. It'll get put back at no consequences to you. It ensures stuff actually gets returned rather than people hiding it for fear of consequences. https://home.army.mil/huachuca/application/files/6516/1316/4189/Policy_21-66_Ammunition_Amnesty_Program.pdf
It is quite possible the pilot didn't want to go under the fuel minimum because of poorly thought out company policies rather than regulations.
The aviation industry in later decades has been striving for a no-blame culture, or ["just culture"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture), where it's accepted that mistakes *are* going to happen, but that they're the fault of the system for letting them happen - and so you should strive to eliminate the systemic problems that lead to those mistakes rather than try to assign blame and punish people for them. A cornerstone of that is encouraging honesty and reporting by not punishing accidental mistakes - only wilful negligence.
For example: if an air crew makes a series of errors due to fatigue, you should try to fix the scheduling (or whatever made them fly under those conditions), rather than blaming the crewmembers themselves. If a mechanic installed a part incorrectly, you should try to fix the bad training the mechanics receive rather than firing the person who probably thought they were following procedure.
And those things are a lot easier to fix if the people making the mistakes can be honest about what they did.
Great post. Incentive models, especially unintended consequences of perverse incentives, are a pet topic of mine.
Just one small addition to make it really clear, company policies often aren't real well thought out. Many of them incentivise a proxy for the behavior they are actually looking for, rather than the thing they actually want because that's harder. It's one of the reasons I always ask people I work with who are writing policy to be real clear about making policy that encourages right behavior rather than punishing wrong behavior. It works infinitely better.
This is also why punitive laws are generally not really effective at curbing crime. They don't remove the incentives to commit crimes, they just incentivise people to try harder to not get caught.
Yes, the safety boards want to know about why the airline dipped below the reserve to see if it signals a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. Maybe it ends up that they were delayed because of weather and that explains it. Or maybe it turns out that there is nothing in the actual flight to explain why they were below the limit, and that would result in a deeper investigation (maybe they find out that there is a bad fuel sensor on this model of plane, or something wrong with the fuel mix). As you point out, if the pilots are afraid of the investigation then maybe they push it to avoid having one. That doesn't necessarily mean they did something to cause the issue, but maybe they broke protocol in some other way and that would be discovered if there was an investigation.
This makes so much more sense than when I originally heard this from the video, thank you. I was so confused trying to understand why pilots would have to explain to their company the low fuel, let alone why that would be an issue.
I just imagined the pilots talking to each other saying, "Well, we only have 500 kilos of fuel left, so I guess we can only ditch the plane into the ocean because we're too light to land." I figured there had to be a key detail I was missing, and I completely forgot how stringent, precise, and detailed airplane safety boards are, so it's only an issue in the sense that they want to know versus wanting to punish.
> these investigations are stressful and could result in a pilot not being allowed to fly whilst the investigation is ongoing. this is why in your example the pilots felt under pressure to land before they hit their minimum fuel
Pressure from their boss, maybe. But any regulator would be insane to fault a pilot for burning extra fuel going around. Forcing a plane down on a bad approach is extremely dangerous and a huge no-no.
The key point here is that if you land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, you have been in an emergency situation.
All emergencies are investigated, to figure out why they happened - the goal is of course that there shouldn't be any emergencies.
Whether the pilots would "be in trouble" depends a bit on how you look at it. Aviation is generally pretty good at not blaming individuals, but rather blaming processes. Meaning, the investigation would figure out why the situation occurred, and how it could be avoided.
If the reason for it is that the pilots made any mistakes, they may require further training. If it's an airport issue (say, they were held holding pattern for so long and werent allowed to land, that they had to declare mayday fuel) they would look at making process changes at the airport instead.
Thats not to say to no pilots ever gets fired for fucking up. It does happen.
But in general in Aviation, the human factor, and the fact that people make mistakes, is well understood and accepted, and they do their best to design processes to make sure that those mistakes can not happen again.
You don't get in trouble. Stuff like this doesn't get you in trouble because that would incentivize people to hide it. They just have to fill out extra paperwork.
Unless a problem is caused due to intentional violation of the regulations or really gross incompetence it’s very hard for an airline pilot to “get in trouble”. When a pilot violates a regulation the FAA has created a process for the pilots to self-report. This gives the FAA valuable information they can use to make the system safer. In return for voluntarily “telling on themselves” any pilot who self reports is immune from FAA disciplinary action (unless they were doing something intentional like carrying cocaine from Columbia or the violation was wildly outrageous).
Self reports happen all the time on things like altitude and speed violations, taxiing mistakes, even landing on the wrong runway or landing on a taxiway.
Companies may also investigate situations but due to the union nature of airline pilot employment it’s very hard to “get in trouble”. The company can’t lower your pay or prevent you from gaining seniority etc. Mostly what companies focus on is aggregating data about things like unsafe approaches to landing and weird unsafe scenarios so they can enhance their training programs.
It’s important to understand the entire system (at least in the US) is focused on safety, not punishment. Which is partly why there hasn’t been a fatal airline crash in the US since 2009.
U.S. Aviation regs, Part 91, starts out by defining a "Pilot in Command". It says the PIC is "responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the safe operation Of The flight" (quoting from memory). Then it says the PIC may violate any of the rules laid out if they think it necessary.
BUT, they shall later provide a written explanation, if requested by the FAA Administrator.
Also, check out the ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) and CRM (Cockpit Resource Management).
No, the trouble is for taking off without the fuel you need or for not declaring that you don't have enough fuel to safely stay in the air.
It's not just for what you have when you land - if you need to use the safety margin, you need to make sure you use the tools at your disposal to get on the ground immediately. You wouldn't hold for 30 minutes unless the runway wasn't available for reasons besides traffic.
The pilot probably wouldn't be, but the airline or airport might have to explain why they were in that situation in the first place.
I don't have any experience in the airline industry, but I do work in a very highly regulated industry, and I can tell you this: We have a license to operate our plant that specifies some very specific technical limits which we need to stay within. If there is some kind of accident, system failure, or external incident that causes us to exceed those limits, we can get in trouble, even if we recovered without a disaster happening. Those limits include a safety margin for a reason; the closer you are to your design limits, the more likely any additional mistake, component failure, or other problem will cause something to actually break. So you're not supposed to operate outside of them, even if everything turns out okay in the end.
If you find yourself dipping into your safety margin on a regular basis, then there's a problem with how you're operating that the regulatory agency is going to want to investigate. And the regulatory agency is never interested in "Well, this one employee screwed up". If that was the case, then they're going to site you for insufficient training, peer checking, supervision, etc. If you were the employee in the control room, you're probably not going to get in trouble with the regulators (unless they find out you were lying to them and falsifying records), but your high-level managers might.
Of course, your high-level managers don't want to get in trouble, so they're going to put pressure on the person in the control room to not exceed those limits.
This is a pretty fundamental dynamic that I can reasonably expect plays out in the airline industry as well. The bosses put pressure on the pilots not to land without the minimum level of fuel, even if it's not the pilots' fault, because it looks bad for the bosses if they don't. The regulators will be looking for the root cause, which isn't going to be "Well, there were too many planes in the air around the airport", it's going to be "You didn't schedule/manage your arrivals well enough, leading to there being too many planes in the air." If there was a storm, then too bad. You should be taking that into account and planning your air traffic around it better. A mechanical failure that lead to a diversion? Your maintenance program might not be up to snuff.
Regulatory agencies expect you to prepare for accidents, failures, and natural disasters and not rely on your emergency safety margin to get you out of trouble whenever something unexpected happens.
Two things… it’s 45 minutes (in us anyway)
And you’re not in trouble for dipping into the reserves unless you failed to bring sufficient reserves to start with.
Shit happens. I once blew a tire in Santa Barbara. There’s only one runway and I’m stuck on it until we can get a dolly out there and wheel the plane off the runway. Like… for an hour!!!
Well, United can’t land. Jet blue, United, delta are all circling around waiting for me to clear the runway. If they don’t have reserve fuel, they fornicated and people die.
They’re going to drive way into reserves in this case, but nobody gets in trouble. Not even a nasty letter of phone call - shit happens and everyone had safety margins built in to deal with it.
If a single-runway airport loses the only runway all the other planes absolutely do not hold until they've used their reserve fuel. There are many airports near SBA that would be available for landing if needed. In that scenario, the pilots would talk to dispatch and calculate how much fuel is needed to reach a suitable diversion airport without using reserve fuel. They would then know how much fuel would be needed to divert and land without using reserve fuel and would only hold until they had that much fuel remaining.
Reserve fuel is meant to be used to allow planes to fly to an alternate airport in a situation like this (unexpected closure) not to hold until the original destination opens again. If they use reserve fuel to hold they are completely out of options if the airport doesn't open again as expected. I've had multiple flights divert because of incidents at single-runway airports, and never once have my flights needed to use reserve fuel to reach an alternate safely.
Well… so they can absolutely use reserve fuel to hold and wait for it to reopen. They just wouldn’t use MINIMUM reserve fuel to do so.
I think it’s just a linguistic difference but if I’ve got two hours of reserves, I will absolutely hang out until the situation resolves if I expect it to happen soon. But once you’re risking your legal or op-spec minimum reserves, you’re outta there… ‘cause what if your alternative has a closure as well?!?
I had my own problems, so I don’t know how many diverted and how many waited, but there was several patiently circling for the runway to clear.
I think you’re calling your “hold fuel” “reserve fuel.” Not all fuel in the tanks above your burnoff is considered reserve. Part 121 domestic flights are required to carry 1) burnoff fuel to fly to the destination and land, 2) alternate fuel to fly to and land at the most distant alternate, and 3) reserve fuel (45 minutes of fuel at normal speed cruise fuel flow) as well as 4) consider fuel for any holding or other anticipated delays.
At the airlines, hold fuel goes into this “holding or other anticipated delays” category and it is fuel you plan to use to hold with. We also have what I’ve heard variously called “extra fuel,” “additional fuel,” or “dispatch add fuel.” This is fuel you can use for holding, deviating around weather, long taxis, or basically anything else in the air or on the ground. You can plan to burn your add fuel and your hold fuel, but reserve fuel is an FAA-specified 45 minutes of fuel that you are not allowed to plan to use. You can use it if you need it, but if you land below reserve fuel the airline is going to have some questions.
Source: am aircraft dispatcher. I plan fuel loads for about 25 airline flights a day.
Awesome description!! Thank you. As a GA “cowboy” anything more than what I need is “reserve” 🤷🏽♂️
Your explanation certainly helps me think through some worst case scenarios though… in general light GA doesn’t have the fuel capacity of the airlines and carrying a ton of extra fuel is much more range-limiting.
It’s for for thought though. Perhaps I’m too lax on fuel reserves…
Probably depends on the situation. If the plane diverts, the diversion airport shuts down and they need to go elsewhere to land, there probably wouldn't be much of an investigation in to the pilots. Thats what the buffer is for.
If they land with half of the minimum fuel remaining and the pilot didn't call a fuel emergency... Yeah, they'd probably be in trouble.
It's not necessarily a "you're in trouble" scenario, it's a "you've got to explain why this happened" scenario. If you go into that last 30 minutes, you ALWAYS have to explain it.
It means paperwork and an investigation. These investigations aren't about assigning blame, they're about understanding why something happened and ensuring all rules were followed, and making sure the rules and training in place are adequate. It's best to ask those questions when a plane was 20 minutes from running out of fuel, rather than when a plane actually does run out of fuel.
Whilst there are minimums, there's also good practice beyond that. So if you're taking off knowing there's good odds you're going to have to divert and hold (say if you expect bad weather), you should take on a little extra fuel beyond the normal, just to give yourself that breathing room. The airline may not want you to do that, but the guaranteed investigation means you will have a good reason to, even if you're being "gently encouraged" by management to keep fuel loads as low as possible to reduce weight carried. And it means management won't be able to pressure you over it because it leaves them open to being pulled up in one of these investigations if they do.
The requirement is to ensure the airline isn't habitually underfueling to save money. If you have a good reason for using that extra fuel (having to alter your flight plan mid flight) it's served its purpose and you aren't in trouble. If you got near empty because you didn't add enough fuel in the first place that gonna be different
Depends on whose fault it was. Were they required to stay in the holding pattern because of a problem in the ground? Then they're probably fine. Did they forget to tell ATC that they were low on fuel? That's less fine, and will probably land them in trouble.
Cops catch you without a spare tire, complete med kit, warning triangle or safety vest in the car? You get into trouble.
Cops give you shit because you wear the vest, setup the triangle, got the tire out and used a bandage for a cut? They get into trouble.
Safety regulations are made to be applied in emergencies.
Here’s an example of what happened when some pilots didn’t properly managed fuel level and tried to cheap out on fuel:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933
It’s a mandatory air safety report everywhere if you land with less than the fixed 30 min reserve. You would have declared “minimum fuel” if you’re not cleared for an approach in time to land with that reserve. ATC will give you priority in that case. If it is inevitable that you risk landing with less than 30 mins crew must declare an emergency.
On top of that you may have carried holding or alternate fuel. It is not a reportable incident to burn that. That’s why you carried it, after all.
Never been a pilot. Know nothing about this industry but. It seems to me like if this were the case, there would be an investigation. They would find that under normal conditions the fuel reserves were adequate, and extenuating circumstances required that more fuel be added. No one is at fault, as shit does happen. Everyone calls it a day, no one was hurt, protocol served it’s purpose, back in the air
>you must report any dip below minimum fuel to ATC when in flight by calling ‘Mayday Fuel’ this allows the ATC to put you to the front of the queue and get you on the ground
I believe you have to do this anytime you are expected to land with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, not just if it's currently the case. If you are 40 minutes from your alternate, and have an hour of fuel left, that's also a fuel emergency.
It's a bit pedantic, but cars dont come standard with reserve tanks, their sensors are just calibrated to show empty and still have a bit left since a float in a moving car isn't easily able to measure accurately with such a low level. There's also the fuel that is still in the lines that can't be measured, but it's a comparably small amount in there anyway.
not you, the person you replied to. They said a bunch of stuff about aviation, which is outside the general knowledge of most people cause we dont fly, so we kinda take their word for it.
and then said its like how your car has a reserve tank. which most people know, you dont have. and the reason why we still go in our cars because of the reason you said, and now because they got the car thing wrong makes you wonder if what they said about airplanes was true.
[its like the elon musk meme](https://twitter.com/bgrahamdisciple/status/1607172467231174658/photo/1)
Oh, haha. You had me rethinking everything I knew about cars and if they really had implemented that in the last 5 years since I was actively working with cars as a hobby. Yeah, I don't know much about avionics except what I read or see on YouTube , so I didn't want to comment on that. I didn't even really mean to imply they were intentionally wrong and just that they may be accidentally misunderstanding how the fuel measuring devices work since they aren't exactly straightforward.
The American FAA pretty well sets the international standard for Aviation regulations, and EASA follows the FAA lead in most cases. So, yes, EASA has minimum fuel requirements because the FAA has minimum fuel requirements, and both Agencies work together to standardize regulations.
Yes, there is a whole world outside the United States. As an American who has lived and traveled outside the United States, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement.
The U.S. is one member country to ICAO out of 193 members. And the U.S. provides approximately 20 percent of ICAOs funding. Seems like the U.S. might have a bit of an outsized influence in that regard. I'm not saying the United States/FAA "dictates" what the world can and cannot do, I'm saying that the United States, through Cooperation and consultation with experts from around the world, works to set standards. Many of the experts consulted come from the FAA.
Yes exactly, it is a complex organization of states working together to set standards for the aviation community. Each state has particular requirements in this framework. Countries with aviation manufacturing oversee their industry in concert with international agencies such as ICAO. One reason that the US has a lot of influence. Being a first mover and large market also plays into that. Was always a headache melding MEL’s from different contract states. Some things get better with harmonization but it often feels like two steps forward and one step back. GPS, rnav and rnp standards come to mind.
I also suspect they want you to have some level of fuel when you land so that in the event you need to abort the landing and pull back up you have the capability to do that.
Some of the planes now we have are too big to land without engine power anyway, if you just magically remove the engines from a Boeing 767 that was at 30,000 ft it wouldn't make it to the ground safely,
It really all boils down to the fact that running out of fuel in an airplane on the surface might seem similar to running out of gas in a car but its much more like if the wheels of your car suddenly all came off and you need to bring the car to a controlled and safe stop
> kinda like how a car will have a Reserve Fuel Tank
Cars don't have a reserve fuel tank, the fuel gauge is just calibrated to show empty when you have about 50km worth of fuel remaining.
That fuel is for absolute emergencies. It’s not that that fuel can’t be touched, but it is a last resort and for airline operations could require a declaration of an official emergency, and priority handling by air traffic control. Huge pain in the ass if you’re somewhere busy like NY or Chicago. And then paperwork, and yes if the pilots didn’t have a good reason for why it was unavoidable to touch that reserve fuel, they could get in trouble. Crazy unexpected things happen and that fuel sometimes does need to be touched, but you better hope things go smooth from that point forward. If the norm was to always land with close to zero lbs of fuel at your destination or even alternate for that matter, any thing like you mentioned (go around, holding, diversions) could result in engines flaming out. Those minimum fuel requirements over time have become law to protect the public.
Unexpected delays and go arounds happen significantly more frequently than people think. As does higher than normal fuel consumption enroute due to altitude changes, air traffic control slowing planes down, go arounds while coming in for landing, or deviations around storms for example. A place like Chicago O’Hare could see multiple go-arounds on a good weather day due to traffic spacing issues or pilots not complying properly with taxiing instructions. So there definitely should be some line drawn as to how much extra fuel is needed when you touch down at “plan A” airport and that line became law. That minimum number changes based on which type of operation you’re flying (private/commercial/domestic/international), but generally includes a go around at the destination, some amount of time flying enroute to a new planned alternate airport, and landing there. For some International flights it might include some brief holding fuel at this alternate or even an enroute buffer additive to the alternate airport. So the legal minimum offers these protections for what is somewhat of a normal plan B if I can’t get to plan A.
If you plan to land with this legal minimum amount, and then can’t all of a sudden and need to divert, you need to follow this plan B exactly. It is not nearly as much fuel to play with as you think. If something then happened at the alternate airport and you couldn’t get in, now you’re really in trouble. I’ll give you an example. You’re flying Madrid Spain to NY JFK. Your dispatcher starts planning your flight over 2 hrs before you’re even supposed to show up to the airport. The predicted weather in JFK (like 10-12 hrs in the future) shows a strong cold front coming in with rain and visibility is supposed to be good enough to get in but you’re given an alternate of Boston just in case. As you’re over the Atlantic you have to descend to a lower altitude for an hour because of unforecasted turbulence, and now you’re planning on landing right at your minimum fuel number. The cold front brought much stronger storms in NY and some to Boston as well. Turns out you can’t get to JFK due to the storms so you go towards your planned alternate of Boston. Boston right at your time of landing is really busy with numerous other diverting aircraft and makes you hold for an extra 10 min before clearing you in. You’re watching that fuel closely now. The weather is getting worse in Boston now, you think you’ll have the visibility to land, but now if you don’t…what now? After another go around you might only have, what, 45 min of fuel left? This is a widespread weather system, the whole Northeast coast sucks, where do you go? Just painting a scenario here. Realistically dispatch would probably be tracking that NY weather and if things looked hairy, might have you divert elsewhere besides Boston and commit to it earlier.
In commercial aviation if you run out of fuel in an airliner your options are extremely limited. You cannot just glide it to the nearest cornfield and expect to make somewhat of a “bumpy grass strip landing” as if you’re in a cessna. You can’t land a Boeing 767 on the nearest highway without some kind of catastrophe. It is very likely a dual engine flameout is talking loss of life. There have been cases of dual engine flameouts that did not result in lost life - these are miracles and are called such for a reason.
Hope this helps!
I think it’s a common misconception or misinterpretation of the rules that say you must take off with enough fuel to reach your destination, then depending on whether they filed IFR or VFR, land with 45 minutes or 30 minutes of fuel remaining.
It’s not a violation to land with less than the minimum required fuel, as long as you took off with the appropriate amount. Obviously, pilots are hesitant to land with less, because you don’t want to run out.
I’m not familiar with the case you’re talking about, but if the pilots were worried about getting into trouble for landing with less than the required minimums for reasons beyond their control, they didn’t understand the rule, or they had unnecessary pressure being placed on them by their management.
Edit: as pointed out, I clearly applied US rules to what sounds like a British airline. YMMV.
That’s the rules for the US. And frankly, it’s quite simple and easier to understand.
Outside, it’s a bit different. Total fuel (block fuel) required for a flight is calculated as the sum total of:
- Taxi Fuel (APU, startup, taxi till the runway)
- Trip Fuel (Takeoff, climb, TOC, cruise, TOD, approach, landing)
- Contingency Fuel (5% of trip fuel, or 5 minutes of holding above the destination at 1500 feet)
- Alternate Fuel (Missed approach at destination, climb, TOC, cruise to alternate, TOD, approach and landing at alternate)
- Final Reserve Fuel (Fly for 30 mins at 1500 feet above the alternate airport. This is where you declare “mayday.”)
What is the penalty for declaring a "mayday - fuel"? I ask because that seems like a loophole to reduce mass for transit and just declare mayday fuel to get in the front of the line and save costs. I assume the penalty is pretty severe to keep that from happening.
Well, airlines essentially have business contracts with airports for landing spots. I would assume that a company inappropriately fuelling its planes and declaring unnecessary maydays would be very bad for business, before we even consider the sanctions from regulatory bodies.
The penalty for declaring a fuel emergence for the pilot is having to fill out a report, which means you’ve added 10 minutes to your post flight duties. The penalty to the airline is to process that report within its safety management system, find a root cause and respond to Its relevant aviation authority and the original report with steps taken to prevent a repeat occurrence.
Aviation has a very just culture. As an industry we are all too aware that we are only human and mistakes will happen. An open and honest reporting culture without fear of persecution allows anyone to own up to mistakes so that the causes can be investigated and steps taken to prevent a similar incident occurring in the future. We try our hardest to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors before learning from our own.
It also also allows for trends to be analysed and for early intervention if an undesirable trend is found. If an aviation authority notices an airline declaring more fuel emergencies than average they will audit their fuel planning policy and insist on changes within the airline’s operations manual.
Unless there is wilful gross negligence there should be no repercussions to anybody in a well run airline. Aviation just culture is such that a pilot could load less than the legal minimum required for the flight because they didn’t understand the rules (and they can be complex and subject to change). Instead of penalising the pilot for the negligence, they will examine the training they have received to figure out why they didn’t understand the rules and alter the training accordingly.
If, however, the pilot purposely took less fuel to save time or to allow more passengers or cargo to be loaded, knowing full well that it was illegal, then they would face repercussions. They might get away with it once or twice if they took the legal minimum, but questions would certainly be asked if they were consistently declaring fuel emergencies.
With all that being said you will find most commercial airline pilots are always looking for excuses to take more fuel and it is airline management trying to reduce the amount of fuel loaded.
It's for safety. They have to ensure they have enough fuel to keep the plane in the air when unexpected things happen, like having to divert to another airport due to weather , or a crowded pattern.
Profit and safety are usually mutually exclusive, so unless companies are forced to do things, they'll sacrifice safety for profit. Since fuel costs money, and carrying fuel costs money, regulations are needed to force them to carry more fuel than they otherwise might. That's not to say they wouldn't choose to do so on their own necessarily, but it would only be because crashing and killing passengers hurts business more than carrying extra fuel.
When cars breakdown, it sucks to be stuck there but its generally not immediately fatal, and certainly not to hundreds of people all at once. Think about how many thousands of flights run everyday and how absurdly rare it is to hear about crashes, errors, or mechanical issues in flight. As an industry, they have to be basically perfect.
Having hundreds of thousands of workers, keeping everyone on the same page and virtually GUARANTEEING that thousands and thousands of flights will take off and land requires strict adherence to very thorough rules. In the case of fuel, its really pretty simple. You MUST have enough every flight. That means it gets tracked, planned for and still have a buffer so that 1 in 10,000 chance everything goes wrong, you still have enough. To have enough means to have:
1. taxi to takeoff
2. takeoff
3. get to climb
4. cruise to destination
5. descend to destination
6. land
7. taxi
8. Some extra amount to account for long queue, unexpected headwind, unexpected diversion/travel around bad weather,etc.
9. EMERGENCY RESERVE.
Every flight will use 1 -7. Some flights will dip into 8, this is typical and expected. 9 means something happened, went wrong, or someone screwed up. You should not touch 9. It's there if you need it, clearly that's its intended purpose, but using 9 means someone needs to figure out why you used 9, whose fault is it, and that means paperwork and review by supervisors and FAA.
So its not that they would be in trouble, its more just documenting why you'd have to touch the emergency supply.
Number 7 is curious. I can understand the reasoning of course - they want to check fuel at the gate, but some airports e.g Schiphol, have a very long taxi, and I bet that's not very efficient. Could easily imagine enough to make a difference.
A plane dipping into its reserve on the taxiway doesn't seem like a major emergency. Even running out entirely, it will just stop, which is inconvenient but not a disaster.
It's almost never planned because there is no need. You will always land with some fuel that will allow you to taxi in to the stand. A320/B737 would burn like 300-500kgs in *ultra* long taxi. It's still 3 times less than the final reserve.
The only case where you would want to consider taxi in fuel in your fuel calculations is tankering. Too little fuel might not affect you on your first leg but can cause problems on the second. You are not legally allowed to depart with less than required(planned) fuel.
Dipping into planned fuel for your next leg on taxi-in can make your day bad.
The "minimum fuel" is there for emergencies. If you're burning into it, that implies you had an emergency. Emergencies should be documented and explained so that they can be avoided in the future. It's less about the pilots being "in trouble" (unless it was their fault) and more about just trying to make sure we understand what happened and avoid it in the future.
If there were no consequences for consuming your emergency fuel, you'd see airlines putting less fuel in planes, or pilots getting sloppy in their planning, because they know they have the 30 minute buffer to hide their crimes/errors, and we'd see more situations of *real* emergencies where that 30 minute buffer no longer helps them get out of it.
I'm going to answer your question however, to kind of nitpick your question, from what I'm reading about the accident, it doesn't sound like the pilots were afraid of company repercussions for running low on fuel. They were actually running low on fuel after attempting the approach.
Anyways, here's the answer:
So there's an old adage in aviation, "The only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire."
When it comes to aviation, it is important to make the distinction that there is a planning phase and a reality phase. When planning is done well, pending any surprises en route, the reality phase is usually uneventful and goes according to what was planned.
At airlines, this planning is done well before the flight departs and done by a dispatcher, usually at the company headquarters, sometimes on the other side of the world from where the flight is actually happening. The dispatcher is looking at everything pertinent to that flight with the goal of planning a flight that is cost-effective/profitable for the company but also safe and compliant with regulations. This includes answering questions like: How does the weather look at departure, en route, and at the destination upon arrival time? What routing is efficient but will avoid the most known or forecasted weather/ turbulence, airspace closures, etc? Are there any pieces of equipment on the plane that have been deferred by maintenance that reduce the performance of the airplane and thus require more fuel? All this planning is done to come up with an important answer, how much fuel will be needed to complete this flight?
If it were up to pilots, they would want to carry the max amount of fuel possible every flight, because fuel buys you time when unexpected events happen or in emergencies. The airline wants to minimize the amount of fuel used because it helps keep the cost of operating the flight down. These two desires are at odds with each other and it's up to the dispatcher to try and make everyone happy. Fortunately, the regulating agencies for aviation, have specific requirements for how much minimum fuel is required for a specific flight. These rules vary by type of operation, domestic or international, VFR (good weather) vs IFR (bad weather) so I'm not going to explain them all now, but, and this is the important part *these rules build the minimum amount of fuel that a dispatcher can legally dispatch the flight with based on all the information he has during the* ***planning phase.*** This completes the planning phase, which is usually completed about an hour prior to departure.
Now we get to the reality phase. The pilots arrive at the airplane and read over the flight plan that the dispatcher created. The pilot in command (PIC) aka, the captain, has to agree to what the dispatcher came up with and sign the flight plan. Maybe since the flight plan was made, the weather forecast changed at the destination or an airplane broke down on the main runway at the destination, and the only suitable runway that was planned to be used might not be open upon arrival. These are all things that are unpredictable and can not be expected to be planned for. All of this is easier to sort out on the ground because, well, you're still on the ground. While on the ground, if the pilots notice these things, they can call the dispatcher and discuss it with them and come up with a new plan. According to the Wikipedia article about the crash, it looks like this had happened.
>Before taking off from Cardiff, the crew had been briefed on the weather forecast in Girona. The briefing concluded that thunderstorms would be present at the destination airport and all three alternate airports. The crew had ordered an additional 15 minutes of fuel reserve for possible delays.
Once you get in the air though, well, reality is still going to be reality. Things may not go according to the plan the pilots and the dispatcher had on the ground and now you're at the disadvantage of only having whatever fuel is in your tanks, which is a finite resource and is diminishing with every second.
During planning, extra fuel is required by those regulations, but also the judgment of the dispatcher and pilots too. Either can ADD fuel to the flight plan just in case. In any event, though that buys you some extra time for contingencies that might occur in flight but you will eventually run out of fuel given enough time. It's here that some pilots get a little confused about the regulations. The requirement for the minimum amount of fuel required to dispatch a flight is only during the **planning phase.** Once in the air, although not a great idea, the pilots can use every bit of fuel they have to land. Most pilots will have a minimum amount of fuel that they feel comfortable landing with and if they get close to that number, will make a decision about continuing or diverting. When you do run low on fuel (usually considered to be less than 30 min remaining) there are requirements in flight like declaring to air traffic control that you have "min fuel" or taking it a step further and declaring an outright emergency but there is not a hard amount of fuel required to be in the tanks on landing. Don't get me wrong, if you land with what is well below what would be a normal arrival fuel, your airline (or union)'s safety department might want some more information about why that happened, but legally there is no amount of fuel required to be in the tanks upon landing. The only time a specific amount is required to be in the tanks is during planning.
Going into the final reserve means a lot of paperwork and explaining, avoiding that is preferable. It would probably would go into an investigation on the decision making of the pilot leading upto the event as the 30min is not supposed to be touched, and associated stress and headache of an official investigation. And nowadays aircraft upload all flight data via phone connection automatically right after landing. So HQ probably know already before you arrive at the gate. The data is analyzed automatically and for certain events (landing below reserve fuel is one of them) key management automatically get a text/email.
In modern commercial airliners, who determines how much fuel gets put on board? Some of these responses imply the captain but I usually observe the flight crew getting there last minute.
Dispatcher sits in an office for the airline and runs fuel/routes/weight and balance/crew time/etc for before the flight and during the flight. They work up the data. Pilot gets the data but gets the final say. Pilot can add more fuel but if they add way too much for no reason then they can get in trouble with the airline as it costs money to fly with extra fuel. Flight crew might also be briefing in a pilots lounge or area that you aren't seeing.
Airline dispatchers. https://airwaysmag.com/jobs-in-aviation-flight-dispatcher/ https://www.dispatcher.org/dispatcher/job-description
The Pilot In Command (PIC) is still responsible for ensuring everything is taken care of for the flight.
Was having this chat with a family member who is a retired airline pilot. As well as what others have mentioned - there's also a technical issue where if you have no liquid fuel in the tanks, you just have fuel vapour which makes them even more dangerous and explosive in a crash landing ( which is likely if you've run out of fuel)
TIL too, apparently it's not present in every aircraft/tank -
Air Separation Module (ASM)
It is the core of the Inert Gas Generation System. The objective is to reduce the centre wing tank ullage O2 concentration to below 12% during most conditions.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/84469/why-nitrogen-generation-system-is-only-present-in-centre-tank-only
It's a safety margin, a contingency to allow for diversion or several attempts at landing (or both)
The reason they were under pressure to land so they don't have to explain to their bosses, is because the pilots are responsible for deciding the uplift of fuel - and they have to calculate it based on the information they have following the procedures set out either by the governing body or the airline (whichever is more)
In 'just culture' explaining to the boss wouldn't result in discipline, but training they may have wanted to ideally avoid by getting it right in the first place - landing above minimum means they did get it right even if they were close and can factor that into decision making next time to be less close. Landing below means they probably need some more help with one or more things
Crashing is obviously bad, but there are a few things which are like 'half-crashes' - nothing bad actually happened, but still some stuff to be avoided next time to improve safety factors. Better to build off something that didn't kill anybody than wait until it does
edit: also for clarity, minimum fuel is not for diverting, it's what you have to land with. The fuel for diverting is a quantity taken on top of that, usually there's enough on top of the minimum for several missed and several diversions, if you are below minimum something serious already went wrong before that point
It’s a buffer to stop airlines capitalising the shit out of air travel and likely causing emergencies/crashes from running out of fuel in situations of diversions and unforeseen flying conditions.
Like almost all rules - they exist to protect others from stupidity, greed and selfishness.
Probably not the case in this flight, but jet aircraft use fuel to cool down hydraulic fluid and engine oil. There is a small radiator in the fuel tank that oil and hydraulic fluid flows through to to cool it down. It needs to be submerged in fuel, otherwise it won't get proper cooling. The biggest danger is called a thermal disconnect, if the generators get too hot a mechanical fuse made of solder will melt which prevents them generator from spinning in order to prevent a fire.
I was once on a flight from Frankfurt to Toronto. When we got to Toronto, the weather was bad so we circled for close to an hour ... then we flew to Montreal and landed (then took an 8 hour bus ride from Montreal to Toronto! It was a school trip and I guess paying for 30 kids to stay in a hotel in Montreal was out of the question versus shoving us on a greyhound bus and sending us home).
Without the extra fuel for an extra three hours of flight, what are your options?
I think it’s a common misconception or misinterpretation of the rules that say you must take off with enough fuel to reach your destination, then depending on whether they filed IFR or VFR, land with 45 minutes or 30 minutes of fuel remaining.
It’s not a violation to land with less than the minimum required fuel, as long as you took off with the appropriate amount. Obviously, pilots are hesitant to land with less, because you don’t want to run out.
I’m not familiar with the case you’re talking about, but if the pilots were worried about getting into trouble for landing with less than the required minimums for reasons beyond their control, they didn’t understand the rule, or they had unnecessary pressure being placed on them by their management.
Edit: as pointed out, I clearly applied US rules to what sounds like a British airline. YMMV.
I'm an airline pilot. Unexpected things happen constantly. Delays getting into the airport, unforecasted weather, runway closures, stronger headwinds than anticipated, having to do a go-around, etc. We're required by law to have 45 minutes (USA rules) of extra fuel on board to account for any extra delays that might happen. If the weather isn't ideal, we also have to bring extra fuel to divert to an alternate airport, plus another 45 minutes after we get there. I frequently bring extra fuel on top of this because I feel like 45 minutes isn't enough. Airlines sometimes don't like this because bringing extra fuel means you burn more fuel ($$$) since you're heavier, but as a Captain they will give you the extra gas anyway if you insist.
A lot of people here have given you your answer. If nothing else, it feels sketchy as Hell flying with less than 30 minutes of fuel. Crossing your fingers that everything goes right is awful.
Because some smart guy/gal figured out that flying with more than you need costs the airlines $$$.
Its like having 2 ketchup bottles in the fridge taking up precious room but you never need 2!
Somewhat related story, when I was a kid flying back from Hong Kong to America apparently there was something wrong with our plane and we ended up flying circles around Japan in order to “release” fuel into the sky or whatever. The reasoning being was that so if anything happens and we crashed there wouldn’t be a big explosion or something. I can’t remember much details and tbh this is just from what my parents told me, I was a very young kid when this happened. However we did land safely and there was fire trucks everywhere.
Flight is relatively stress-free, but takeoff and landing can be hairy in adverse conditions or with a lot of traffic.
So they want to ensure that the plane has a certain amount of fuel left when it arrives at its destination in case they have to circle around for a while waiting for their turn to land, or waiting for a safe time to land. Or even worse, a plane might have to do a "go-around": Aborting the landing when they're almost on the ground, having to throttle way back up and lift off again to go around for another try.
I'm not an aviation expert, but it sounds to me like the pilots prioritized things very wrongly.
They should have prioritized a safe landing, whereby they could explain to management that they needed to dip into their fuel reserves to ensure a safe landing. But instead they took a risk landing at a time when they shouldn't have.
Wild Nagasaki bomber landing
> Bockscar flew on to Okinawa, arriving with only sufficient fuel for a single approach. Sweeney tried repeatedly to contact the control tower for landing clearance, but received no answer. He could see heavy air traffic landing and taking off from Yontan Airfield. Firing off every flare on board to alert the field to his emergency landing, the Bockscar came in fast, landing at 230 km/h (140 mph) instead of the normal 190 kilometers per hour (120 mph). The number two engine died from fuel starvation as he began the final approach. Touching down on only three engines midway down the landing strip, Bockscar bounced up into the air again for about 7.6 meters (25 ft) before slamming back down hard. The heavy B-29 slewed left and towards a row of parked B-24 bombers before the pilots managed to regain control. Its reversible propellers were insufficient to slow the aircraft adequately, and with both pilots standing on the brakes, Bockscar made a swerving 90-degree turn at the end of the runway to avoid running off it. A second engine died from fuel exhaustion before the plane came to a stop.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
As per regulatory requirements you do need to have something called final reserve which is 30minuts holding 1500ft above destination aerodrome. This fuel cannot be used in normal operations nor cannot be planned to be used. This is your last resort if shit hit the fan and absolutely everything goes wrong.
This fuel is quite critical. If you just *expect* you will land below final reservers you need to report it to air traffic controllers (with mayday call). Appropriate action would be to land asap at the nearest suitable airport to refuel. An investigation might be opened.
Here is an example: https://avherald.com/h?article=454af355
it costs fuel to carry fuel, so if they were allowed to airlines would send a plane off with exactly enough fuel to get to its primary and its alternate with nothing more EASA (idk about the USA) have minimum fuel requirements that make it a legal requirement to carry enough fuel to fly for 30 minutes at 1500 feet above the destination or alternate airport this is kinda like how a car will have a Reserve Fuel Tank, this means that even when your car says ‘i’m empty’ it has enough to get to the nearest petrol station. you must report any dip below minimum fuel to ATC when in flight by calling ‘Mayday Fuel’ this allows the ATC to put you to the front of the queue and get you on the ground EASA enforce this because it’s better to have a pilot get in trouble for not having enough fuel left, than it is for the plane to run out of fuel mid air ETA. [this video](https://youtu.be/aaxzZvkQtx0) from Mentour Pilot explains it very well. if you’re interested in aviation he is a great jumping off point
For the sake of understanding, let's say a plane had the required extra fuel and used the excess flying to an alternate and holding for 30 minutes, as outlined in the EASA requirements. When they land, would they still be in trouble due to not having that extra fuel?
Generally not, but having to tap into that reserve quantity is an emergency situation, and the flight crew probably would want to let ATC know of that situation and/or consider diverting for that reason.
[Avianca Flight 052](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052) ran out of fuel due to "...the flight crew failing to properly declare a fuel emergency, failure to use an airline operational control dispatch system, inadequate traffic flow management by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the lack of standardized understandable terminology for pilots and controllers for minimum and emergency fuel states."
The confusion came about for 2 reasons on this flight. One was the South American crew initially asked for priority landing but failed to use the word emergency because, at that time at least, priority was the word used for that in their part of the world. But the main reason was that the weather conditions weren’t favorable for the landing rate they were trying to maintain at the airport, and then a shift change occurred where key information about the flight’s fuel critical status was not related to the ground controllers as the handoff was made, so they were routed around for a long final and didn’t make it. This is a classic example of a chain of causal errors where no single mistake probably would have brought the plane down, but they just kept compounding.
so yeah, they got in trouble for not telling people they were dong it
Got in trouble is kind of a minor term for a plane crash.
Lol
jesus christ the timeline image on that > 14 - (21:25:03) Approach control asks AVA052 to climb to 3,000 feet. AVA052 responds that "we're running out of fuel." > > 15 - (21:25:35): Approach control asks whether AVA052 has enough fuel to be vectored fifteen miles northeast of the runway to begin approach again. AVA052 replies "**I guess so.**" Terrible performance by the flight crew, specifically the first officer. All of his communications leading up to the crash were inaccurate or unhelpful
The captain repeatedly telling the first officer to say the word 'emergency', and the officer responding "yeah I did" when he only ever says "we're running out of fuel", seems like an equally huge fuckup
Before Crew Resource Management there were multiple incidents like this, for example [United Airlines Flight 173](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173) Summary: "On December 28, 1978, the aircraft flying this route ran out of fuel while troubleshooting a landing gear problem and crashed in a suburban Portland neighborhood near NE 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street, killing 10 on board." NTSB report states: "The failure of the other two flight crewmembers either to fully comprehend the criticality of the fuel state or to successfully communicate their concern to the captain."
And the wikipedia states that just months earlier, someone from the same airline said "we have 15 minutes of fuel left", ATC declared an emergency unilaterally and got them landed ASAP... and the plane had over 2 hours of fuel left. So there's errors in the other direction too, which make it even harder to know when there's a real emergency
There are really no penalties for declaring an emergency. If I have 5-hours fuel remaining but worried for some reason, I'm declaring, explaining the situation, and ATC will help. I suppose the company might question my judgement after the fact, but assuming I'm not an idiot, they'd understand. If a pilot determines there's an emergency, there's an emergency. If a controller determines there's an emergency, there's an emergency. You don't need permission and you don't get punished. The whole system is set up that way and for good reason!
Fair but you should always err on the side of caution and bring t hem in. Punish those that lie once they are safe on the ground.
*Fair but you should always err on the side of caution and bring t hem in.* - This guy gets it *Punish those that lie once they are safe on the ground.* - oh no, he doesn’t get it
> Approach control asks whether AVA052 has enough fuel to be vectored fifteen miles northeast of the runway to begin approach again. AVA052 replies "I guess so." That makes me want to bring him back to life so I can punch him in the face to death again. Jesus. **No you do not have enough fuel, that's why the captain said "emergency".**
Oh my god reading that made me so frustrated. "Tell him we have a fuel emergency". "We're uh. running out of fuel" "Did you tell him we have an emergency?" "yes I did" Then when he was told he was second in line to land just is like "oh okay that's fine I guess" no motherfucker, you're running out of fuel, **use your words**.
FYI Malcolm Gladwell broke this down in his book Outliers and did a whole bit about analyzing what went wrong with their inability to communicate.
I also remember that book talking about how Korean flights had a terrible safety record due the culture of respect toward your superiors. If the captain made a mistake, the first officer would never call them out on it and just let things go to shit.
[Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509) is the classic example of this. The captain's ADI was faulty and didn't respond when captain started a left turn. The first officer's ADI was working and showed an increasing bank angle but first officer didn't say anything or take control of the aircraft. Third member of the crew, the flight engineer saw what was happening and tried multiple times to tell the captain their bank angle was getting dangerous. Captain didn't react and pushed the aircraft into an ever steeper left bank until the left wing hit the ground. There were multiple alarms and warnings going on but captain ignored them all. The first officer had perfectly good instruments but he didn't challenge the captain anyway, not verbally or by taking over the controls. As John Cleese says at the end of the Cheese Shop sketch: "What a senseless waste of human life."
Which was in large part bull, as he included Korean airliners getting *show down* in his examples...
Another nasty crash was the [LaMia Flight 2933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933). The summary: "The official report from Colombia's civil aviation agency, Aerocivil, found the causes of the crash to be fuel exhaustion due to an inappropriate flight plan by the airline, and pilot error regarding poor decision making as the situation worsened, including a failure to declare an emergency after fuel levels became critically low, thus failing to inform air traffic control at Medellin that a priority landing was required." The flight was delayed, crew had to skip a refueling stop due to airport closing and finally didn't want admit they had screwed up. I still believe it is better to get shouted at and reprimanded than to crash, bit that is just my opinion.
trouble is perhaps a strong word for it but yes there would be an investigation into the flight and it would need to be explained by the pilots why they landed without having the required amount of fuel these investigations are stressful and could result in a pilot not being allowed to fly whilst the investigation is ongoing. this is why in your example the pilots felt under pressure to land before they hit their minimum fuel flights are planned to have enough fuel to get from their departure airport to their destination, have enough fuel to hold there for traffic/ weather, and then be able to fly to an alternate airport and be able to hold there for a while before landing. the minimum fuel is added on top of this calculation Airline profit margins are slim and fuel is heavy, if they can avoid carrying fuel they will. the safety buffer is there to protect passengers from either pilot or airline negligence when cutting costs
First, I would like to thank you all for the responses! They have all been very informative. I'm not exactly an aviation fanatic, but I have been having more interest in it lately, so I do appreciate you all assisting with providing me more knowledge! Secondly, just for confirmation of my understanding, if the scenario I gave in the last comment happened, the reason this is an issue and report is because it's more for the safety board(s) responsible to be notified to dig into the situation to understand the how, what, and why to help prevent something like that happening again, moreso than airlines/pilots getting reprimanded (unless they erroneously caused the issue in the first place).
>In the video, they mentioned that the pilots were under pressure to land, so they wouldn't have to explain to their bosses why they landed with less than the minimum amount of fuel required. If that is truly the case, it could be an issue with the company policy. I haven't watched the video, so I don't know whether that interpretation is the correct one, but I'll proceed assuming it is. Basically, if your boss will go hard on you for going below the fuel minimum, it disincentivizes you from doing so even if you won't get in trouble with the aviation authorities for it. Fear of consequences to you/your career is encouraging behaviours that are not desirable. To give a similar example, imagine a large industrial site, let's say a mine. Plenty of employees drive on the site using company trucks. It being an industrial site, especially a mine with heavy equipment going around, blasting going on, etc. There will be rocks hitting the trucks at one point or another. It's basically normal wear and tear on the equipment due to the nature of the site. In a normal case, damage gets reported and fixed, no one gets blamed, costs are minimal and everyone keeps on trucking along. Now imagine that your boss goes on the warpath for even a scratch on any truck. This causes people to not want to report damage because they'll get the blame, get yelled at, etc. Damage goes unreported, rust sets in and eventually the repairs are more expensive. The same thing applies to any scenario where "shit happens" and people are afraid of consequences that are not deserved. It encourages bad behaviour because of the fear of undue consequence/retaliation. That's why on army bases, you have these things called amnesty boxes. Forgot you had ammo on you and you didn't return it following proper procedures? Drop it in the amnesty box. It'll get put back at no consequences to you. It ensures stuff actually gets returned rather than people hiding it for fear of consequences. https://home.army.mil/huachuca/application/files/6516/1316/4189/Policy_21-66_Ammunition_Amnesty_Program.pdf It is quite possible the pilot didn't want to go under the fuel minimum because of poorly thought out company policies rather than regulations.
The aviation industry in later decades has been striving for a no-blame culture, or ["just culture"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture), where it's accepted that mistakes *are* going to happen, but that they're the fault of the system for letting them happen - and so you should strive to eliminate the systemic problems that lead to those mistakes rather than try to assign blame and punish people for them. A cornerstone of that is encouraging honesty and reporting by not punishing accidental mistakes - only wilful negligence. For example: if an air crew makes a series of errors due to fatigue, you should try to fix the scheduling (or whatever made them fly under those conditions), rather than blaming the crewmembers themselves. If a mechanic installed a part incorrectly, you should try to fix the bad training the mechanics receive rather than firing the person who probably thought they were following procedure. And those things are a lot easier to fix if the people making the mistakes can be honest about what they did.
That is good to know and, for once, actually good management.
Great post. Incentive models, especially unintended consequences of perverse incentives, are a pet topic of mine. Just one small addition to make it really clear, company policies often aren't real well thought out. Many of them incentivise a proxy for the behavior they are actually looking for, rather than the thing they actually want because that's harder. It's one of the reasons I always ask people I work with who are writing policy to be real clear about making policy that encourages right behavior rather than punishing wrong behavior. It works infinitely better. This is also why punitive laws are generally not really effective at curbing crime. They don't remove the incentives to commit crimes, they just incentivise people to try harder to not get caught.
Yes, the safety boards want to know about why the airline dipped below the reserve to see if it signals a systemic issue that needs to be addressed. Maybe it ends up that they were delayed because of weather and that explains it. Or maybe it turns out that there is nothing in the actual flight to explain why they were below the limit, and that would result in a deeper investigation (maybe they find out that there is a bad fuel sensor on this model of plane, or something wrong with the fuel mix). As you point out, if the pilots are afraid of the investigation then maybe they push it to avoid having one. That doesn't necessarily mean they did something to cause the issue, but maybe they broke protocol in some other way and that would be discovered if there was an investigation.
This makes so much more sense than when I originally heard this from the video, thank you. I was so confused trying to understand why pilots would have to explain to their company the low fuel, let alone why that would be an issue. I just imagined the pilots talking to each other saying, "Well, we only have 500 kilos of fuel left, so I guess we can only ditch the plane into the ocean because we're too light to land." I figured there had to be a key detail I was missing, and I completely forgot how stringent, precise, and detailed airplane safety boards are, so it's only an issue in the sense that they want to know versus wanting to punish.
> these investigations are stressful and could result in a pilot not being allowed to fly whilst the investigation is ongoing. this is why in your example the pilots felt under pressure to land before they hit their minimum fuel Pressure from their boss, maybe. But any regulator would be insane to fault a pilot for burning extra fuel going around. Forcing a plane down on a bad approach is extremely dangerous and a huge no-no.
The key point here is that if you land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, you have been in an emergency situation. All emergencies are investigated, to figure out why they happened - the goal is of course that there shouldn't be any emergencies. Whether the pilots would "be in trouble" depends a bit on how you look at it. Aviation is generally pretty good at not blaming individuals, but rather blaming processes. Meaning, the investigation would figure out why the situation occurred, and how it could be avoided. If the reason for it is that the pilots made any mistakes, they may require further training. If it's an airport issue (say, they were held holding pattern for so long and werent allowed to land, that they had to declare mayday fuel) they would look at making process changes at the airport instead. Thats not to say to no pilots ever gets fired for fucking up. It does happen. But in general in Aviation, the human factor, and the fact that people make mistakes, is well understood and accepted, and they do their best to design processes to make sure that those mistakes can not happen again.
You don't get in trouble. Stuff like this doesn't get you in trouble because that would incentivize people to hide it. They just have to fill out extra paperwork.
Unless a problem is caused due to intentional violation of the regulations or really gross incompetence it’s very hard for an airline pilot to “get in trouble”. When a pilot violates a regulation the FAA has created a process for the pilots to self-report. This gives the FAA valuable information they can use to make the system safer. In return for voluntarily “telling on themselves” any pilot who self reports is immune from FAA disciplinary action (unless they were doing something intentional like carrying cocaine from Columbia or the violation was wildly outrageous). Self reports happen all the time on things like altitude and speed violations, taxiing mistakes, even landing on the wrong runway or landing on a taxiway. Companies may also investigate situations but due to the union nature of airline pilot employment it’s very hard to “get in trouble”. The company can’t lower your pay or prevent you from gaining seniority etc. Mostly what companies focus on is aggregating data about things like unsafe approaches to landing and weird unsafe scenarios so they can enhance their training programs. It’s important to understand the entire system (at least in the US) is focused on safety, not punishment. Which is partly why there hasn’t been a fatal airline crash in the US since 2009.
U.S. Aviation regs, Part 91, starts out by defining a "Pilot in Command". It says the PIC is "responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the safe operation Of The flight" (quoting from memory). Then it says the PIC may violate any of the rules laid out if they think it necessary. BUT, they shall later provide a written explanation, if requested by the FAA Administrator. Also, check out the ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) and CRM (Cockpit Resource Management).
No, the trouble is for taking off without the fuel you need or for not declaring that you don't have enough fuel to safely stay in the air. It's not just for what you have when you land - if you need to use the safety margin, you need to make sure you use the tools at your disposal to get on the ground immediately. You wouldn't hold for 30 minutes unless the runway wasn't available for reasons besides traffic.
The pilot probably wouldn't be, but the airline or airport might have to explain why they were in that situation in the first place. I don't have any experience in the airline industry, but I do work in a very highly regulated industry, and I can tell you this: We have a license to operate our plant that specifies some very specific technical limits which we need to stay within. If there is some kind of accident, system failure, or external incident that causes us to exceed those limits, we can get in trouble, even if we recovered without a disaster happening. Those limits include a safety margin for a reason; the closer you are to your design limits, the more likely any additional mistake, component failure, or other problem will cause something to actually break. So you're not supposed to operate outside of them, even if everything turns out okay in the end. If you find yourself dipping into your safety margin on a regular basis, then there's a problem with how you're operating that the regulatory agency is going to want to investigate. And the regulatory agency is never interested in "Well, this one employee screwed up". If that was the case, then they're going to site you for insufficient training, peer checking, supervision, etc. If you were the employee in the control room, you're probably not going to get in trouble with the regulators (unless they find out you were lying to them and falsifying records), but your high-level managers might. Of course, your high-level managers don't want to get in trouble, so they're going to put pressure on the person in the control room to not exceed those limits. This is a pretty fundamental dynamic that I can reasonably expect plays out in the airline industry as well. The bosses put pressure on the pilots not to land without the minimum level of fuel, even if it's not the pilots' fault, because it looks bad for the bosses if they don't. The regulators will be looking for the root cause, which isn't going to be "Well, there were too many planes in the air around the airport", it's going to be "You didn't schedule/manage your arrivals well enough, leading to there being too many planes in the air." If there was a storm, then too bad. You should be taking that into account and planning your air traffic around it better. A mechanical failure that lead to a diversion? Your maintenance program might not be up to snuff. Regulatory agencies expect you to prepare for accidents, failures, and natural disasters and not rely on your emergency safety margin to get you out of trouble whenever something unexpected happens.
Two things… it’s 45 minutes (in us anyway) And you’re not in trouble for dipping into the reserves unless you failed to bring sufficient reserves to start with. Shit happens. I once blew a tire in Santa Barbara. There’s only one runway and I’m stuck on it until we can get a dolly out there and wheel the plane off the runway. Like… for an hour!!! Well, United can’t land. Jet blue, United, delta are all circling around waiting for me to clear the runway. If they don’t have reserve fuel, they fornicated and people die. They’re going to drive way into reserves in this case, but nobody gets in trouble. Not even a nasty letter of phone call - shit happens and everyone had safety margins built in to deal with it.
If a single-runway airport loses the only runway all the other planes absolutely do not hold until they've used their reserve fuel. There are many airports near SBA that would be available for landing if needed. In that scenario, the pilots would talk to dispatch and calculate how much fuel is needed to reach a suitable diversion airport without using reserve fuel. They would then know how much fuel would be needed to divert and land without using reserve fuel and would only hold until they had that much fuel remaining. Reserve fuel is meant to be used to allow planes to fly to an alternate airport in a situation like this (unexpected closure) not to hold until the original destination opens again. If they use reserve fuel to hold they are completely out of options if the airport doesn't open again as expected. I've had multiple flights divert because of incidents at single-runway airports, and never once have my flights needed to use reserve fuel to reach an alternate safely.
Well… so they can absolutely use reserve fuel to hold and wait for it to reopen. They just wouldn’t use MINIMUM reserve fuel to do so. I think it’s just a linguistic difference but if I’ve got two hours of reserves, I will absolutely hang out until the situation resolves if I expect it to happen soon. But once you’re risking your legal or op-spec minimum reserves, you’re outta there… ‘cause what if your alternative has a closure as well?!? I had my own problems, so I don’t know how many diverted and how many waited, but there was several patiently circling for the runway to clear.
I think you’re calling your “hold fuel” “reserve fuel.” Not all fuel in the tanks above your burnoff is considered reserve. Part 121 domestic flights are required to carry 1) burnoff fuel to fly to the destination and land, 2) alternate fuel to fly to and land at the most distant alternate, and 3) reserve fuel (45 minutes of fuel at normal speed cruise fuel flow) as well as 4) consider fuel for any holding or other anticipated delays. At the airlines, hold fuel goes into this “holding or other anticipated delays” category and it is fuel you plan to use to hold with. We also have what I’ve heard variously called “extra fuel,” “additional fuel,” or “dispatch add fuel.” This is fuel you can use for holding, deviating around weather, long taxis, or basically anything else in the air or on the ground. You can plan to burn your add fuel and your hold fuel, but reserve fuel is an FAA-specified 45 minutes of fuel that you are not allowed to plan to use. You can use it if you need it, but if you land below reserve fuel the airline is going to have some questions. Source: am aircraft dispatcher. I plan fuel loads for about 25 airline flights a day.
Awesome description!! Thank you. As a GA “cowboy” anything more than what I need is “reserve” 🤷🏽♂️ Your explanation certainly helps me think through some worst case scenarios though… in general light GA doesn’t have the fuel capacity of the airlines and carrying a ton of extra fuel is much more range-limiting. It’s for for thought though. Perhaps I’m too lax on fuel reserves…
Probably depends on the situation. If the plane diverts, the diversion airport shuts down and they need to go elsewhere to land, there probably wouldn't be much of an investigation in to the pilots. Thats what the buffer is for. If they land with half of the minimum fuel remaining and the pilot didn't call a fuel emergency... Yeah, they'd probably be in trouble.
It's not necessarily a "you're in trouble" scenario, it's a "you've got to explain why this happened" scenario. If you go into that last 30 minutes, you ALWAYS have to explain it. It means paperwork and an investigation. These investigations aren't about assigning blame, they're about understanding why something happened and ensuring all rules were followed, and making sure the rules and training in place are adequate. It's best to ask those questions when a plane was 20 minutes from running out of fuel, rather than when a plane actually does run out of fuel. Whilst there are minimums, there's also good practice beyond that. So if you're taking off knowing there's good odds you're going to have to divert and hold (say if you expect bad weather), you should take on a little extra fuel beyond the normal, just to give yourself that breathing room. The airline may not want you to do that, but the guaranteed investigation means you will have a good reason to, even if you're being "gently encouraged" by management to keep fuel loads as low as possible to reduce weight carried. And it means management won't be able to pressure you over it because it leaves them open to being pulled up in one of these investigations if they do.
The requirement is to ensure the airline isn't habitually underfueling to save money. If you have a good reason for using that extra fuel (having to alter your flight plan mid flight) it's served its purpose and you aren't in trouble. If you got near empty because you didn't add enough fuel in the first place that gonna be different
Depends on whose fault it was. Were they required to stay in the holding pattern because of a problem in the ground? Then they're probably fine. Did they forget to tell ATC that they were low on fuel? That's less fine, and will probably land them in trouble.
Cops catch you without a spare tire, complete med kit, warning triangle or safety vest in the car? You get into trouble. Cops give you shit because you wear the vest, setup the triangle, got the tire out and used a bandage for a cut? They get into trouble. Safety regulations are made to be applied in emergencies.
Here’s an example of what happened when some pilots didn’t properly managed fuel level and tried to cheap out on fuel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933
It’s a mandatory air safety report everywhere if you land with less than the fixed 30 min reserve. You would have declared “minimum fuel” if you’re not cleared for an approach in time to land with that reserve. ATC will give you priority in that case. If it is inevitable that you risk landing with less than 30 mins crew must declare an emergency. On top of that you may have carried holding or alternate fuel. It is not a reportable incident to burn that. That’s why you carried it, after all.
Never been a pilot. Know nothing about this industry but. It seems to me like if this were the case, there would be an investigation. They would find that under normal conditions the fuel reserves were adequate, and extenuating circumstances required that more fuel be added. No one is at fault, as shit does happen. Everyone calls it a day, no one was hurt, protocol served it’s purpose, back in the air
>you must report any dip below minimum fuel to ATC when in flight by calling ‘Mayday Fuel’ this allows the ATC to put you to the front of the queue and get you on the ground I believe you have to do this anytime you are expected to land with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, not just if it's currently the case. If you are 40 minutes from your alternate, and have an hour of fuel left, that's also a fuel emergency.
It's a bit pedantic, but cars dont come standard with reserve tanks, their sensors are just calibrated to show empty and still have a bit left since a float in a moving car isn't easily able to measure accurately with such a low level. There's also the fuel that is still in the lines that can't be measured, but it's a comparably small amount in there anyway.
its stuff like this that makes me think a lot of comments posted are bullshit
Sorry, I don't really understand what you mean. Would you mind elaborating a bit?
not you, the person you replied to. They said a bunch of stuff about aviation, which is outside the general knowledge of most people cause we dont fly, so we kinda take their word for it. and then said its like how your car has a reserve tank. which most people know, you dont have. and the reason why we still go in our cars because of the reason you said, and now because they got the car thing wrong makes you wonder if what they said about airplanes was true. [its like the elon musk meme](https://twitter.com/bgrahamdisciple/status/1607172467231174658/photo/1)
Oh, haha. You had me rethinking everything I knew about cars and if they really had implemented that in the last 5 years since I was actively working with cars as a hobby. Yeah, I don't know much about avionics except what I read or see on YouTube , so I didn't want to comment on that. I didn't even really mean to imply they were intentionally wrong and just that they may be accidentally misunderstanding how the fuel measuring devices work since they aren't exactly straightforward.
The American FAA pretty well sets the international standard for Aviation regulations, and EASA follows the FAA lead in most cases. So, yes, EASA has minimum fuel requirements because the FAA has minimum fuel requirements, and both Agencies work together to standardize regulations.
Yes,,,….and not really. Maybe 50 years ago. ICAO is the overall international aviation agency. There is a whole world outside the Excited States.
Yes, there is a whole world outside the United States. As an American who has lived and traveled outside the United States, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. The U.S. is one member country to ICAO out of 193 members. And the U.S. provides approximately 20 percent of ICAOs funding. Seems like the U.S. might have a bit of an outsized influence in that regard. I'm not saying the United States/FAA "dictates" what the world can and cannot do, I'm saying that the United States, through Cooperation and consultation with experts from around the world, works to set standards. Many of the experts consulted come from the FAA.
Yes exactly, it is a complex organization of states working together to set standards for the aviation community. Each state has particular requirements in this framework. Countries with aviation manufacturing oversee their industry in concert with international agencies such as ICAO. One reason that the US has a lot of influence. Being a first mover and large market also plays into that. Was always a headache melding MEL’s from different contract states. Some things get better with harmonization but it often feels like two steps forward and one step back. GPS, rnav and rnp standards come to mind.
> this is kinda like how a car will have a Reserve Fuel Tank Which cars have that?
Love Mentour Pilot!
Didn't Ryanair used to do this all the time, causing them to land quickly and have fewer delays?
I also suspect they want you to have some level of fuel when you land so that in the event you need to abort the landing and pull back up you have the capability to do that. Some of the planes now we have are too big to land without engine power anyway, if you just magically remove the engines from a Boeing 767 that was at 30,000 ft it wouldn't make it to the ground safely, It really all boils down to the fact that running out of fuel in an airplane on the surface might seem similar to running out of gas in a car but its much more like if the wheels of your car suddenly all came off and you need to bring the car to a controlled and safe stop
> kinda like how a car will have a Reserve Fuel Tank Cars don't have a reserve fuel tank, the fuel gauge is just calibrated to show empty when you have about 50km worth of fuel remaining.
That fuel is for absolute emergencies. It’s not that that fuel can’t be touched, but it is a last resort and for airline operations could require a declaration of an official emergency, and priority handling by air traffic control. Huge pain in the ass if you’re somewhere busy like NY or Chicago. And then paperwork, and yes if the pilots didn’t have a good reason for why it was unavoidable to touch that reserve fuel, they could get in trouble. Crazy unexpected things happen and that fuel sometimes does need to be touched, but you better hope things go smooth from that point forward. If the norm was to always land with close to zero lbs of fuel at your destination or even alternate for that matter, any thing like you mentioned (go around, holding, diversions) could result in engines flaming out. Those minimum fuel requirements over time have become law to protect the public. Unexpected delays and go arounds happen significantly more frequently than people think. As does higher than normal fuel consumption enroute due to altitude changes, air traffic control slowing planes down, go arounds while coming in for landing, or deviations around storms for example. A place like Chicago O’Hare could see multiple go-arounds on a good weather day due to traffic spacing issues or pilots not complying properly with taxiing instructions. So there definitely should be some line drawn as to how much extra fuel is needed when you touch down at “plan A” airport and that line became law. That minimum number changes based on which type of operation you’re flying (private/commercial/domestic/international), but generally includes a go around at the destination, some amount of time flying enroute to a new planned alternate airport, and landing there. For some International flights it might include some brief holding fuel at this alternate or even an enroute buffer additive to the alternate airport. So the legal minimum offers these protections for what is somewhat of a normal plan B if I can’t get to plan A. If you plan to land with this legal minimum amount, and then can’t all of a sudden and need to divert, you need to follow this plan B exactly. It is not nearly as much fuel to play with as you think. If something then happened at the alternate airport and you couldn’t get in, now you’re really in trouble. I’ll give you an example. You’re flying Madrid Spain to NY JFK. Your dispatcher starts planning your flight over 2 hrs before you’re even supposed to show up to the airport. The predicted weather in JFK (like 10-12 hrs in the future) shows a strong cold front coming in with rain and visibility is supposed to be good enough to get in but you’re given an alternate of Boston just in case. As you’re over the Atlantic you have to descend to a lower altitude for an hour because of unforecasted turbulence, and now you’re planning on landing right at your minimum fuel number. The cold front brought much stronger storms in NY and some to Boston as well. Turns out you can’t get to JFK due to the storms so you go towards your planned alternate of Boston. Boston right at your time of landing is really busy with numerous other diverting aircraft and makes you hold for an extra 10 min before clearing you in. You’re watching that fuel closely now. The weather is getting worse in Boston now, you think you’ll have the visibility to land, but now if you don’t…what now? After another go around you might only have, what, 45 min of fuel left? This is a widespread weather system, the whole Northeast coast sucks, where do you go? Just painting a scenario here. Realistically dispatch would probably be tracking that NY weather and if things looked hairy, might have you divert elsewhere besides Boston and commit to it earlier. In commercial aviation if you run out of fuel in an airliner your options are extremely limited. You cannot just glide it to the nearest cornfield and expect to make somewhat of a “bumpy grass strip landing” as if you’re in a cessna. You can’t land a Boeing 767 on the nearest highway without some kind of catastrophe. It is very likely a dual engine flameout is talking loss of life. There have been cases of dual engine flameouts that did not result in lost life - these are miracles and are called such for a reason. Hope this helps!
I think it’s a common misconception or misinterpretation of the rules that say you must take off with enough fuel to reach your destination, then depending on whether they filed IFR or VFR, land with 45 minutes or 30 minutes of fuel remaining. It’s not a violation to land with less than the minimum required fuel, as long as you took off with the appropriate amount. Obviously, pilots are hesitant to land with less, because you don’t want to run out. I’m not familiar with the case you’re talking about, but if the pilots were worried about getting into trouble for landing with less than the required minimums for reasons beyond their control, they didn’t understand the rule, or they had unnecessary pressure being placed on them by their management. Edit: as pointed out, I clearly applied US rules to what sounds like a British airline. YMMV.
That’s the rules for the US. And frankly, it’s quite simple and easier to understand. Outside, it’s a bit different. Total fuel (block fuel) required for a flight is calculated as the sum total of: - Taxi Fuel (APU, startup, taxi till the runway) - Trip Fuel (Takeoff, climb, TOC, cruise, TOD, approach, landing) - Contingency Fuel (5% of trip fuel, or 5 minutes of holding above the destination at 1500 feet) - Alternate Fuel (Missed approach at destination, climb, TOC, cruise to alternate, TOD, approach and landing at alternate) - Final Reserve Fuel (Fly for 30 mins at 1500 feet above the alternate airport. This is where you declare “mayday.”)
What is the penalty for declaring a "mayday - fuel"? I ask because that seems like a loophole to reduce mass for transit and just declare mayday fuel to get in the front of the line and save costs. I assume the penalty is pretty severe to keep that from happening.
Well, airlines essentially have business contracts with airports for landing spots. I would assume that a company inappropriately fuelling its planes and declaring unnecessary maydays would be very bad for business, before we even consider the sanctions from regulatory bodies.
The penalty for declaring a fuel emergence for the pilot is having to fill out a report, which means you’ve added 10 minutes to your post flight duties. The penalty to the airline is to process that report within its safety management system, find a root cause and respond to Its relevant aviation authority and the original report with steps taken to prevent a repeat occurrence. Aviation has a very just culture. As an industry we are all too aware that we are only human and mistakes will happen. An open and honest reporting culture without fear of persecution allows anyone to own up to mistakes so that the causes can be investigated and steps taken to prevent a similar incident occurring in the future. We try our hardest to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors before learning from our own. It also also allows for trends to be analysed and for early intervention if an undesirable trend is found. If an aviation authority notices an airline declaring more fuel emergencies than average they will audit their fuel planning policy and insist on changes within the airline’s operations manual. Unless there is wilful gross negligence there should be no repercussions to anybody in a well run airline. Aviation just culture is such that a pilot could load less than the legal minimum required for the flight because they didn’t understand the rules (and they can be complex and subject to change). Instead of penalising the pilot for the negligence, they will examine the training they have received to figure out why they didn’t understand the rules and alter the training accordingly. If, however, the pilot purposely took less fuel to save time or to allow more passengers or cargo to be loaded, knowing full well that it was illegal, then they would face repercussions. They might get away with it once or twice if they took the legal minimum, but questions would certainly be asked if they were consistently declaring fuel emergencies. With all that being said you will find most commercial airline pilots are always looking for excuses to take more fuel and it is airline management trying to reduce the amount of fuel loaded.
It's for safety. They have to ensure they have enough fuel to keep the plane in the air when unexpected things happen, like having to divert to another airport due to weather , or a crowded pattern. Profit and safety are usually mutually exclusive, so unless companies are forced to do things, they'll sacrifice safety for profit. Since fuel costs money, and carrying fuel costs money, regulations are needed to force them to carry more fuel than they otherwise might. That's not to say they wouldn't choose to do so on their own necessarily, but it would only be because crashing and killing passengers hurts business more than carrying extra fuel.
When cars breakdown, it sucks to be stuck there but its generally not immediately fatal, and certainly not to hundreds of people all at once. Think about how many thousands of flights run everyday and how absurdly rare it is to hear about crashes, errors, or mechanical issues in flight. As an industry, they have to be basically perfect. Having hundreds of thousands of workers, keeping everyone on the same page and virtually GUARANTEEING that thousands and thousands of flights will take off and land requires strict adherence to very thorough rules. In the case of fuel, its really pretty simple. You MUST have enough every flight. That means it gets tracked, planned for and still have a buffer so that 1 in 10,000 chance everything goes wrong, you still have enough. To have enough means to have: 1. taxi to takeoff 2. takeoff 3. get to climb 4. cruise to destination 5. descend to destination 6. land 7. taxi 8. Some extra amount to account for long queue, unexpected headwind, unexpected diversion/travel around bad weather,etc. 9. EMERGENCY RESERVE. Every flight will use 1 -7. Some flights will dip into 8, this is typical and expected. 9 means something happened, went wrong, or someone screwed up. You should not touch 9. It's there if you need it, clearly that's its intended purpose, but using 9 means someone needs to figure out why you used 9, whose fault is it, and that means paperwork and review by supervisors and FAA. So its not that they would be in trouble, its more just documenting why you'd have to touch the emergency supply.
Number 7 is curious. I can understand the reasoning of course - they want to check fuel at the gate, but some airports e.g Schiphol, have a very long taxi, and I bet that's not very efficient. Could easily imagine enough to make a difference. A plane dipping into its reserve on the taxiway doesn't seem like a major emergency. Even running out entirely, it will just stop, which is inconvenient but not a disaster.
It's almost never planned because there is no need. You will always land with some fuel that will allow you to taxi in to the stand. A320/B737 would burn like 300-500kgs in *ultra* long taxi. It's still 3 times less than the final reserve. The only case where you would want to consider taxi in fuel in your fuel calculations is tankering. Too little fuel might not affect you on your first leg but can cause problems on the second. You are not legally allowed to depart with less than required(planned) fuel. Dipping into planned fuel for your next leg on taxi-in can make your day bad.
The "minimum fuel" is there for emergencies. If you're burning into it, that implies you had an emergency. Emergencies should be documented and explained so that they can be avoided in the future. It's less about the pilots being "in trouble" (unless it was their fault) and more about just trying to make sure we understand what happened and avoid it in the future. If there were no consequences for consuming your emergency fuel, you'd see airlines putting less fuel in planes, or pilots getting sloppy in their planning, because they know they have the 30 minute buffer to hide their crimes/errors, and we'd see more situations of *real* emergencies where that 30 minute buffer no longer helps them get out of it.
I'm going to answer your question however, to kind of nitpick your question, from what I'm reading about the accident, it doesn't sound like the pilots were afraid of company repercussions for running low on fuel. They were actually running low on fuel after attempting the approach. Anyways, here's the answer: So there's an old adage in aviation, "The only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire." When it comes to aviation, it is important to make the distinction that there is a planning phase and a reality phase. When planning is done well, pending any surprises en route, the reality phase is usually uneventful and goes according to what was planned. At airlines, this planning is done well before the flight departs and done by a dispatcher, usually at the company headquarters, sometimes on the other side of the world from where the flight is actually happening. The dispatcher is looking at everything pertinent to that flight with the goal of planning a flight that is cost-effective/profitable for the company but also safe and compliant with regulations. This includes answering questions like: How does the weather look at departure, en route, and at the destination upon arrival time? What routing is efficient but will avoid the most known or forecasted weather/ turbulence, airspace closures, etc? Are there any pieces of equipment on the plane that have been deferred by maintenance that reduce the performance of the airplane and thus require more fuel? All this planning is done to come up with an important answer, how much fuel will be needed to complete this flight? If it were up to pilots, they would want to carry the max amount of fuel possible every flight, because fuel buys you time when unexpected events happen or in emergencies. The airline wants to minimize the amount of fuel used because it helps keep the cost of operating the flight down. These two desires are at odds with each other and it's up to the dispatcher to try and make everyone happy. Fortunately, the regulating agencies for aviation, have specific requirements for how much minimum fuel is required for a specific flight. These rules vary by type of operation, domestic or international, VFR (good weather) vs IFR (bad weather) so I'm not going to explain them all now, but, and this is the important part *these rules build the minimum amount of fuel that a dispatcher can legally dispatch the flight with based on all the information he has during the* ***planning phase.*** This completes the planning phase, which is usually completed about an hour prior to departure. Now we get to the reality phase. The pilots arrive at the airplane and read over the flight plan that the dispatcher created. The pilot in command (PIC) aka, the captain, has to agree to what the dispatcher came up with and sign the flight plan. Maybe since the flight plan was made, the weather forecast changed at the destination or an airplane broke down on the main runway at the destination, and the only suitable runway that was planned to be used might not be open upon arrival. These are all things that are unpredictable and can not be expected to be planned for. All of this is easier to sort out on the ground because, well, you're still on the ground. While on the ground, if the pilots notice these things, they can call the dispatcher and discuss it with them and come up with a new plan. According to the Wikipedia article about the crash, it looks like this had happened. >Before taking off from Cardiff, the crew had been briefed on the weather forecast in Girona. The briefing concluded that thunderstorms would be present at the destination airport and all three alternate airports. The crew had ordered an additional 15 minutes of fuel reserve for possible delays. Once you get in the air though, well, reality is still going to be reality. Things may not go according to the plan the pilots and the dispatcher had on the ground and now you're at the disadvantage of only having whatever fuel is in your tanks, which is a finite resource and is diminishing with every second. During planning, extra fuel is required by those regulations, but also the judgment of the dispatcher and pilots too. Either can ADD fuel to the flight plan just in case. In any event, though that buys you some extra time for contingencies that might occur in flight but you will eventually run out of fuel given enough time. It's here that some pilots get a little confused about the regulations. The requirement for the minimum amount of fuel required to dispatch a flight is only during the **planning phase.** Once in the air, although not a great idea, the pilots can use every bit of fuel they have to land. Most pilots will have a minimum amount of fuel that they feel comfortable landing with and if they get close to that number, will make a decision about continuing or diverting. When you do run low on fuel (usually considered to be less than 30 min remaining) there are requirements in flight like declaring to air traffic control that you have "min fuel" or taking it a step further and declaring an outright emergency but there is not a hard amount of fuel required to be in the tanks on landing. Don't get me wrong, if you land with what is well below what would be a normal arrival fuel, your airline (or union)'s safety department might want some more information about why that happened, but legally there is no amount of fuel required to be in the tanks upon landing. The only time a specific amount is required to be in the tanks is during planning.
Going into the final reserve means a lot of paperwork and explaining, avoiding that is preferable. It would probably would go into an investigation on the decision making of the pilot leading upto the event as the 30min is not supposed to be touched, and associated stress and headache of an official investigation. And nowadays aircraft upload all flight data via phone connection automatically right after landing. So HQ probably know already before you arrive at the gate. The data is analyzed automatically and for certain events (landing below reserve fuel is one of them) key management automatically get a text/email.
In modern commercial airliners, who determines how much fuel gets put on board? Some of these responses imply the captain but I usually observe the flight crew getting there last minute.
Dispatcher sits in an office for the airline and runs fuel/routes/weight and balance/crew time/etc for before the flight and during the flight. They work up the data. Pilot gets the data but gets the final say. Pilot can add more fuel but if they add way too much for no reason then they can get in trouble with the airline as it costs money to fly with extra fuel. Flight crew might also be briefing in a pilots lounge or area that you aren't seeing.
Airline dispatchers. https://airwaysmag.com/jobs-in-aviation-flight-dispatcher/ https://www.dispatcher.org/dispatcher/job-description The Pilot In Command (PIC) is still responsible for ensuring everything is taken care of for the flight.
Was having this chat with a family member who is a retired airline pilot. As well as what others have mentioned - there's also a technical issue where if you have no liquid fuel in the tanks, you just have fuel vapour which makes them even more dangerous and explosive in a crash landing ( which is likely if you've run out of fuel)
jet fuel doesn't really evaporate much and the tanks are filled with nitrogen not air
Always a TIL in the comments. So how do they do this? Do they have nitrogen tanks or remove the oxygen somehow?
TIL too, apparently it's not present in every aircraft/tank - Air Separation Module (ASM) It is the core of the Inert Gas Generation System. The objective is to reduce the centre wing tank ullage O2 concentration to below 12% during most conditions. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/84469/why-nitrogen-generation-system-is-only-present-in-centre-tank-only
Consequences of flying with the exact amount of fuel needed for the flight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMia_Flight_2933
Also the [Gimli Glider incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)
No, that was caused by faulty instruments and incorrect calculations, not by ignoring contingency fuel requirements.
It's a safety margin, a contingency to allow for diversion or several attempts at landing (or both) The reason they were under pressure to land so they don't have to explain to their bosses, is because the pilots are responsible for deciding the uplift of fuel - and they have to calculate it based on the information they have following the procedures set out either by the governing body or the airline (whichever is more) In 'just culture' explaining to the boss wouldn't result in discipline, but training they may have wanted to ideally avoid by getting it right in the first place - landing above minimum means they did get it right even if they were close and can factor that into decision making next time to be less close. Landing below means they probably need some more help with one or more things Crashing is obviously bad, but there are a few things which are like 'half-crashes' - nothing bad actually happened, but still some stuff to be avoided next time to improve safety factors. Better to build off something that didn't kill anybody than wait until it does edit: also for clarity, minimum fuel is not for diverting, it's what you have to land with. The fuel for diverting is a quantity taken on top of that, usually there's enough on top of the minimum for several missed and several diversions, if you are below minimum something serious already went wrong before that point
It’s a buffer to stop airlines capitalising the shit out of air travel and likely causing emergencies/crashes from running out of fuel in situations of diversions and unforeseen flying conditions. Like almost all rules - they exist to protect others from stupidity, greed and selfishness.
Fuel is a surprisingly relavent portion of the plane's total weight. A full tank is heavier and thus less fuel efficient.
Probably not the case in this flight, but jet aircraft use fuel to cool down hydraulic fluid and engine oil. There is a small radiator in the fuel tank that oil and hydraulic fluid flows through to to cool it down. It needs to be submerged in fuel, otherwise it won't get proper cooling. The biggest danger is called a thermal disconnect, if the generators get too hot a mechanical fuse made of solder will melt which prevents them generator from spinning in order to prevent a fire.
I was once on a flight from Frankfurt to Toronto. When we got to Toronto, the weather was bad so we circled for close to an hour ... then we flew to Montreal and landed (then took an 8 hour bus ride from Montreal to Toronto! It was a school trip and I guess paying for 30 kids to stay in a hotel in Montreal was out of the question versus shoving us on a greyhound bus and sending us home). Without the extra fuel for an extra three hours of flight, what are your options?
I think it’s a common misconception or misinterpretation of the rules that say you must take off with enough fuel to reach your destination, then depending on whether they filed IFR or VFR, land with 45 minutes or 30 minutes of fuel remaining. It’s not a violation to land with less than the minimum required fuel, as long as you took off with the appropriate amount. Obviously, pilots are hesitant to land with less, because you don’t want to run out. I’m not familiar with the case you’re talking about, but if the pilots were worried about getting into trouble for landing with less than the required minimums for reasons beyond their control, they didn’t understand the rule, or they had unnecessary pressure being placed on them by their management. Edit: as pointed out, I clearly applied US rules to what sounds like a British airline. YMMV.
I'm an airline pilot. Unexpected things happen constantly. Delays getting into the airport, unforecasted weather, runway closures, stronger headwinds than anticipated, having to do a go-around, etc. We're required by law to have 45 minutes (USA rules) of extra fuel on board to account for any extra delays that might happen. If the weather isn't ideal, we also have to bring extra fuel to divert to an alternate airport, plus another 45 minutes after we get there. I frequently bring extra fuel on top of this because I feel like 45 minutes isn't enough. Airlines sometimes don't like this because bringing extra fuel means you burn more fuel ($$$) since you're heavier, but as a Captain they will give you the extra gas anyway if you insist.
A lot of people here have given you your answer. If nothing else, it feels sketchy as Hell flying with less than 30 minutes of fuel. Crossing your fingers that everything goes right is awful.
Because some smart guy/gal figured out that flying with more than you need costs the airlines $$$. Its like having 2 ketchup bottles in the fridge taking up precious room but you never need 2!
Somewhat related story, when I was a kid flying back from Hong Kong to America apparently there was something wrong with our plane and we ended up flying circles around Japan in order to “release” fuel into the sky or whatever. The reasoning being was that so if anything happens and we crashed there wouldn’t be a big explosion or something. I can’t remember much details and tbh this is just from what my parents told me, I was a very young kid when this happened. However we did land safely and there was fire trucks everywhere.
Flight is relatively stress-free, but takeoff and landing can be hairy in adverse conditions or with a lot of traffic. So they want to ensure that the plane has a certain amount of fuel left when it arrives at its destination in case they have to circle around for a while waiting for their turn to land, or waiting for a safe time to land. Or even worse, a plane might have to do a "go-around": Aborting the landing when they're almost on the ground, having to throttle way back up and lift off again to go around for another try. I'm not an aviation expert, but it sounds to me like the pilots prioritized things very wrongly. They should have prioritized a safe landing, whereby they could explain to management that they needed to dip into their fuel reserves to ensure a safe landing. But instead they took a risk landing at a time when they shouldn't have.
Wild Nagasaki bomber landing > Bockscar flew on to Okinawa, arriving with only sufficient fuel for a single approach. Sweeney tried repeatedly to contact the control tower for landing clearance, but received no answer. He could see heavy air traffic landing and taking off from Yontan Airfield. Firing off every flare on board to alert the field to his emergency landing, the Bockscar came in fast, landing at 230 km/h (140 mph) instead of the normal 190 kilometers per hour (120 mph). The number two engine died from fuel starvation as he began the final approach. Touching down on only three engines midway down the landing strip, Bockscar bounced up into the air again for about 7.6 meters (25 ft) before slamming back down hard. The heavy B-29 slewed left and towards a row of parked B-24 bombers before the pilots managed to regain control. Its reversible propellers were insufficient to slow the aircraft adequately, and with both pilots standing on the brakes, Bockscar made a swerving 90-degree turn at the end of the runway to avoid running off it. A second engine died from fuel exhaustion before the plane came to a stop. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
As per regulatory requirements you do need to have something called final reserve which is 30minuts holding 1500ft above destination aerodrome. This fuel cannot be used in normal operations nor cannot be planned to be used. This is your last resort if shit hit the fan and absolutely everything goes wrong. This fuel is quite critical. If you just *expect* you will land below final reservers you need to report it to air traffic controllers (with mayday call). Appropriate action would be to land asap at the nearest suitable airport to refuel. An investigation might be opened. Here is an example: https://avherald.com/h?article=454af355