Originally Posted by
Klauss
There is an alternative to less and less fuel: carry more final reserve fuel on every flight, decrease risk, increase safety level.
No joke - serious €€€ study.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...69699716304513
Anything out there that proves to an equal level of science that the new EASA fuel ideas are safe, or, at least, safe enough ?
How safe, exactly ?
This study is a bit biased. It forgets about diversion fuel. (or at least it seems like it?)
They experimented an extremely remote scenario, then showed that 10% of crews would have needed more than the 30 minutes of final reserve to land safely.
Except that real airplanes carry final reserve and diversion fuel...
This extremely remote scenario, to be a real problem, would need to happen after a diversion. A diversion is a remote event, somewhere I guess in the range of 1 out of 1000 hours (or even less likely).
So their probability of crashing due to fuel starvation is miscalculated.
They actually give a figure for this : 0.02% of flights are concerned. So basically, if a major event happens to an airplane, there is a 99.98% probability it will happen to an airplane already carrying enough fuel. So it's 1 out of 5000 flights only.
Plus, if they wanted to study the fuel starvation event, they should have put more time pressure on the crew, by giving them only 30 mins of fuel and then study what happened. They answer about this remark in their analysis but they should have made the experiment for real if they really wanted to prove something.
Then, they replace the average cost of a crash with the maximum cost of a crash. 2 billion euros, isn't that a bit large for the average crash ?
Then, they say that training is difficult to put in place.
Accordingly, such new training concepts as an alternative corrective action cannot be implemented immediately and may require additional years of research.
If they made just a second scenario like this to the same crews a few days later they could compare the average performance. If, like they say, we don't know how to properly train pilots, they could have proved it that way.
Landings with less than 45 min should require a mandatory report to the authorities in order to allow EASA to assess the actual fuel starvation risk within Europe.
It's so rare, so why not, it would not inconvenience crews too much.
I may be mistaken on some points since I read all this rather quickly before doing other things today.
In any case, thanks for sharing this.