Originally Posted by
NARVAL
Dear friends...
I am retired, thanks to a god who forgot to point his finger at me during my career...
I admire your knowledge, your professional curiosity and I love reading the tech logs.I wish you all the best during these difficult times. But here I feel compelled to say STOP!
Who cares about five minutes six minutes and statistical survey of approaches for the last fifty years?
Take a reasonable amount of fuel using your knowledge and experience. Never let the statisticians dictate you anything. Ask your copilot if he is happy with the fuel you decided to take. That's important. And stay cool...very cool...Aviation is a very simple art complicated by people who do not have a very happy life. And they are more obtrusive as times goes by...
Quite right, however, questioning the nitty gritty of a computer flight planning system is good practice as it can sometimes uncover errors in the programming. I once discovered that our flight planning system was not applying a wind correction to the climb segment. It didn't normally make much of a difference but on one flight a 100 knot headwind at relatively low levels resulted in a plan that was significantly light on fuel. Question and understand the small anomalies because one day those small anomalies will be magnified into a big one. Maybe a one minute difference is a rounding error, maybe it's a consequence of rarely used section of the fuel policy, or maybe it is an error that is symptomatic of a larger issue. There is no harm questioning why your plan says 6 minutes instead of 5 even if you are actually taking 30 minutes of extra fuel.