Originally Posted by
Beer Baron
I find it amusing seeing some posters desperately trying to sling mud at QF with misplaced equivalencies to this incident. God knows why, as the SQ incident has nothing at all to do with QF.
One poster, drawing on a decade old incident in Munich, stated there was ‘un-forecast fog’.
Another mentions Mildura, where once again there was un-forecast fog.
In the incident at hand the report clearly states, right at the start:
So there were TEMPO thunder storms forecast for their arrival. It wasn’t a surprise. But they chose not to take 60 mins holding fuel. I don’t care what your fuel policy says is legal, that’s just stupid.
Before you argue they had diversion fuel, so don’t need an alternate, recall that Batam is 15Nm away from SIN. It is your base turn. You can’t be surprised that storms in SIN also lead to storms in Batam.
This is a pretty disturbing incident and people trying to deflect attention onto historical QF incidents clearly have either severe anti-QF issues or simply don’t understand what a dangerous situation these SQ passengers were in.
No doubt its a disturbing incident. However the link to the Mildura incident was not whether the crew were caught out by weather, but more so that like what is being insinuated about SQ, QF apoears to have not complied fully with the investigation. The crew busted a minima when the fuel state probably did not require them to, they did not declare a mayday when intending to perform an emergency landing below minima, therefore no services were in attendence. After the landing the crew refueled and departed, which conveniantly deleted the cvr data, after such an event the crew should have been stood down. QF appears to have provided no FDR information or even actual fuel data. The ATSB used calculated data and fuel uplifts from third parties to work out roughly how much fuel the QF aircraft had. The crew knew about the TEMPO, claimed they had holding fuel for it, then landed immediately claiming they had 'low fuel'. That whole event is just as disturbing, and leaves you wondering how many other times are minimas busted by this company and nobody finds out.