Originally Posted by
Kennytheking
A common misconception. Altitude has practically no effect on endurance....and at a moderately busy airport ATC will probably not allow it anyway.
There may be some merit in holding at altitude if you are waiting for weather and end up diverting from the hold rather than shooting an approach.
i can attest to that from a real world scenario. Had to divert mid flight due to a hydraulics issue. Way above max landing weight with no ability to dump. We would have landed overweight if required but we decided to do our best to reduce the weight. We had some time to reach our nearest suitable. Dropped from fl340 to 15000 feet about an hour before landing. The increase in fuel burn was marginal. Because of said hydraulic issue we decided to drop the gear very very early to make sure we definitely could still do it before losing all of the hydraulic fluid(I can’t remember exactly when but memory says 20-30 mins before landing) and even that didn’t give us the increase in fuel burn that we were expecting. In the end we landed 100-200 kilos under MLW. Just to be clear MLW wasn’t a major concern. If we had somewhere suitable nearer we’d have landed there MLW be damned. But we had time to make sure we had one less tech log entry to make.
out of curiosity was the scenario a kind of pre command assessment?