Ryanair tanker flights ?

[Ivor_Novello]

Just out of curiosity

Was flying Ryanair Prestwick to Riga and back at the weekend. Before leaving on Fri I checked to see if the return flight (monday night) went up in price from the £ 0.01 I had paid.
Turned out it showed as fully booked.

Monday night the flight was far from fully booked. 6 rows at the front and 5 at the back were blocked off. Thats 66 seats. And not every seat in the middle section was taken.

Why do they do that ? It looked as if the flight was "capped" to about 100 pax.
Only thought I came up with was, given the cost of fuel in Latvia, they use the opportunity to fill the tanks up as much as they can, hence the limitation on seats for W&B reasons.

Did I guess right ? Nice thought if something goes wrong during landing :)

[fivejuliet]

Its common practice at FR to block either a certain amount at the front and back or a certain amount at the front. Mainly for CofG reasons, I gather.


I've been on flights where these have been blocked, before all other seats were filled so they had to unblock them lol

[Ivor_Novello]

Yeah I know they do that, but I also have been on many Ryanair flights which were full wall to wall, and it didn't seem to affect the CofG then.

Since a couple of days before my flight you couldn't but a ticket for it, I assumed it was full. It then turns out there were at least 80 empty seats. So why couldn't you buy a ticket then ?

Only reason I could come up with, is to make room for fuel and or cargo.
Given the cost of fuel in Latvia (£ 0.6 per litre at the petrol station) I assumed that Ryanair might make more money carrying fuel from Latvia rather than taking passengers at £ 1.99 per ticket ? ;)

[Vasto1M]

Taken from Ryanairs website......

Flights TO and FROM Riga (RIX/Latvia) and Kaunas (KUN/Lithuania) for travel within 7 days of departure & flights TO and FROM Berlin Schonefeld (SXF/Germany) for travel within 3 days of departure can only be booked by calling our reservation centre.

.... Thats why it showed the flight on Monday as being fully booked.

However in my experience they will take as much return trip fuel as possible with them to certain destinations. Sometime this is for cost and other times its because of possible problems with fuel supplies down-route.

[razzele]

737800s dont generally tanker above 5 tonnes when temperatures are below 10c, this is to avoid wing ice forming as a result of cold 'soaked' fuel.

By avoiding one need of deicing the likelyhood of a deicing delay is avoided. Wouldnt fancy a trying a ryanair 25minute turnaround with a deice crammed in there!

However if a standard environmental deice/antice is anticipated then tankering larger quantities may occur.

[Desert Diner]

While gasoline/petrol may be subsidized in some places that is normaly not the case for jet fuel.

[kick the tires]

Desert,

fuel may not be 'subsidised' but the cost can vary enormously. We at easy have a complicated formula that accounts for cost of fuel at departure/ cost at destination/ increase engine use due to increased weights/ tire wear etc etc.

The amount of tankering does vary and I assure you the cost of fuel varies enormously at some airfields. Mostly it is due to the transportation costs of getting the fuel to the airport itself, which is passed onto the customer.

In such cases we will tanker to MTOW or MLW (actually minus 500kgs to allow for LMC's) but I've never had cause to block off seats to allow extra fuel carriage! Mind you, at .01p per seat it is prob more cost effective to do just that!!!

[737]

In Ryanair when pax numbers are below a certain level a few seat rows are blocked off to help with the c. of g. This is necessary because they only use the forward hold for bags as this saves time on turnarounds, the rear hold is only used when the front one is full. Ryanair do not carry cargo except company stuff e.g aircraft parts.

The fuel tankering policy works as follows:

The aircraft can be operated at three different MTOWs, 66990, 69990 and 74990kgs. It is usual to set the MTOW to that which is required for pax load plus planned sector fuel. Fuel is then tankered up to that MTOW (or max landing weight plus trip fuel) e.g

aircraft weight including pax and sector fuel 62500kg
MTOW 66990kg

approx 4500kg of fuel can be tankered.

The MTOW is not usually changed and pax are not off-loaded to enable tankering. On long sectors they usually plan to land with no more than 5000kgs of fuel on board to avoid having to de-ice due to 'cold soaked fuel frost'.