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Old 22nd Jul 2022, 11:36
  #95 (permalink)  
Uplinker
 
Join Date: Nov 1999
Location: UK
Posts: 2,471
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My 2p is that minimising fuel is daft and unprofessional. I am am not advocating taking full tanks wherever you go, nor am I advocating taking ridiculous amounts of extra fuel and causing more emissions, but this whole minimum fuel thing is dangerous and puts an extra burden on crews, which, on top of fatigue and difficult rosters is really not a good thing. If an aircraft cannot take enough fuel, then obviously its ZFM is too great and they need to take out some seats.

Year's ago, I flew with an old Captain who had been some sort of fuel use "expert" in his previous airline. He scribbled all over the PLOGs I had carefully prepared, saying well we don't need this and we don't need that and if we use this alternate blah blah, then we only need this much fuel, happy? Well, no not really, but I was a very new, very junior F/O, so off we went.

We got to Guernsey, and made our approach......to minimums........and went around. Oh dear, the weather was worse than forecast, and he had not brought the poor weather fuel.

A quick circuit and we tried again, only to go-around again. Now we were in deep ****, (Guernsey is an island in the English Channel, UK). We dived into Jersey, (the island 'next door'), (I think we declared a MAYDAY), and thankfully got in. When we shut down, his hands were shaking and I thought you stupid dick-head. You have put us all under strain and stress, not to mention endangering us all, for......what?
We had a couple of people like him in the next airline I joined, who seemed to delight in rounding figures down instead of up and all sorts of other nonsense in "proving" they could land closer to legal minimum fuel than everybody else, as if it was some sort of game .

One other time, the weather at Alicante unexpectedly went out, and at least four aircraft from a certain Irish company immediately broke off and diverted to Valencia, as did those from a few other airlines. Valencia very soon became full and unable to accept any more diverting aircraft.

Not big. Not clever, Not professional. I am not blaming crews, it is the airlines who mandate this nonsense. And it is nonsense because the only reason they are doing it is so they can advertise even cheaper seat prices.

ATC are quite right to refuse to assist aircraft who are deliberately taking minimum fuel. Saying they will not respond other than to a MAYDAY is the right response in my view. Otherwise, every airline would be declaring minimum fuel and expecting priority over everyone else. This would rapidly become farcical, not to mention even more dangerous.
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