Originally Posted by
Denti
I guess you didn't read the thread. First of all, no, you do not declare mayday only once you are below final reserve fuel, you declare it as soon as you are reasonably sure that you will land with less than final reserve fuel. Which can be at a time where you are still quite a bit above final reserve fuel. Not to mention, at some point the low fuel warning of the aircraft will come on, that is a LAND ASAP amber indication which could be interpreted as reason for a PAN or MAYDAY depending on how you are trained.
And as has been explained in here, you fly to your destination, you do the approach, missed approach, decide straight away you want to divert, and ATC tells you to stand by for 15 to 20 minutes. That is an amount of time that is not included in your alternate fuel. You are straight away in a mayday situation as you will land below final reserve fuel. Of course, there could be contingency fuel, if that hasn't been used before, but that is at minimum only 5 minutes worth of holding. You still have to wait another 10 to 15 minutes until ATC has sorted out the approval, routing and so on. Still a mayday situation.
Of course, we could always take those 15 minutes as extra fuel. And personally i like to take 20 minutes into the london TMA simply because they advise us that "no delay" means up to 20 minutes of holding. But during a low season day to your homebase in benign weather? Probably not.
Agree on the above. I believe that all those kind of considerations should be embedded in the fuel planning regulations at EASA level. If I have the legal amount of fuel at all times and take my decisions accordingly I can't end up in an emergency because TMAs are busy and ATCs need to coordinate diversions and so on. I mean if that is always case it is perfectly fine and understandable given the amount of traffic nowadays, but the rules should take it into account and EASA should intervene through the appropriate channels to ensure Operators plan fuel accordingly.