Timeline for Was this flight a fuel emergency?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 13, 2019 at 14:47 | comment | added | Pete855217 | 10 minutes before 'minimum' fuel estimate for landing, including contingency, not 10 minutes before they run out of fuel! If it ever got to '10 minutes left', then yes that constitutes an emergency. This is an extremely rare, and very reportable situation that would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb afterwards. In Australia (at least) the regulator would be notified and would raise a case investigation over it. MH got into trouble at LHR years ago for cutting fuel load to minimums, then 'requiring' a landing slot/runway from controllers due to low fuel. They got into big trouble! | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 20:28 | comment | added | SMS von der Tann | You can go onto flightradar24.com to find flight history as well, but no ATC recordings. | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 20:26 | history | edited | SMS von der Tann |
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| Feb 7, 2016 at 17:02 | vote | accept | Thomas Steinke | ||
| Feb 7, 2016 at 17:01 | comment | added | Thomas Steinke | Thanks for the great answers. It sounds like the captain just chose his words poorly. | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 12:51 | comment | added | mins | To summarize: When starting the hold, the captain was at about equal time from KBOS and KBDL (10 mn). He holded for a certain amount of time. When he had 80 mn of fuel in tanks, he was informed that he would have to wait 60 mn more. He calculated he would land with fuel in tanks for 10 mn (which would be used to taxi). He decided to fly to KBDL alternate, where he likely landed with 70 mn fuel left. Without holding time for KBOS he would have had the same quantity when landing at KBOS. Nothing seems wrong or related to an emergency here. | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 7:08 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAviation/status/696229089460486144 | ||
| Feb 7, 2016 at 5:42 | answer | added | aeroalias | timeline score: 23 | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 5:26 | answer | added | Ben | timeline score: 19 | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 5:00 | comment | added | reirab | You can normally find ATC recordings at liveatc.net. Funnily enough, their KBOS feeds are down right now because a cable got cut due to the snowfall (I guess from a plow or ice accretion on aerial lines/tree branches.) If you post a separate question regarding finding the ATC recordings, you can probably get better help finding the right feed(s) than leaving it combined with all of these other questions. By the way, welcome to Aviation.SE! | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 5:00 | comment | added | Thomas Steinke | @Terry Thanks. So you are saying the pilot meant "we had about 10 minutes of holding time left." That sounds reasonable to me. | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 4:47 | comment | added | Terry | Had I been the captain making that announcement, what I would have been saying was that at the point I diverted, we had 10 minutes of the fuel left that had been loaded for purposes of getting to Boston and doing any necessary holding. So at that point in the tanks there was 10 minutes of flying time fuel plus the fuel required to get to the filed alternate, plus the required reserve after that. What I would have been doing was diverting to the alternate 10 minutes before I was required to so for the simple reason that I was going to have to wait for 50 minutes beyond that time. No emergency. | |
| Feb 7, 2016 at 3:56 | review | First posts | |||
| Feb 7, 2016 at 4:57 | |||||
| Feb 7, 2016 at 3:43 | history | asked | Thomas Steinke | CC BY-SA 3.0 |