Virgin 901 25th Nov - fuel!
Just a quick thanks to the chaps at Scottish and London who allowed us to stay high on our arrival yesterday. We were aware that the usual positioning for the LAM3A has us descending to F280 well before we'd ideally go down, and we were a little tighter for fuel than we'd like, so we asked through Scottish if we could stay at F400 'for fuel reasons'.
It seemed, though, that one or two controllers interpreted that as just short of a fuel emergency, and were anticipating us calling a Pan, or worse, on the way in. Well, thanks chaps, but it wasn't that bad! We like to arrive at the final holding fix with 10 tonnes of fuel, and we anticipated being a tonne below that if we accepted the early descent. That would have potentially been a problem had we needed to hold for a significant period - which was forecast. Being able to stay at F400 allowed us to arrive at the hold with the desired 10 tonnes - and, of course, the delays evaporated as we entered the hold!
Thought the explanation might help - and it was nice to know that you were ready for us if we'd been as low on gas as you feared!