Late Developer.
It is entirely reasonable for you to expect that your safety will be paramount in your Captain's mind.
To survive, commercial aviation must strike an efficient balance, where safety is number one but not with such huge margins that it makes flying economically impossible. There are over a million air transport operations in and out of UK airports each year. I would be guessing, but I bet that less than 100 of those involve some sort of fuel shortage and way fewer involve a diversion due fuel. No single operator seems to be having proportionally more 'occurrances' than others and I am not aware that we have yet had a fuel related accident; you are paying in the £100s for a ticket to New York.
Yes, we do have the occasional fuel incident, which we work together to resolve and yes, we do need to understand why they occur, but wouldn't you say that on balance the professionals up front are getting it about right?
Professional aircrew:
Going back to a point made earlier about the impact on other operators when one aircraft has a fuel problem: It is worth remembering that we now have procedures for sterilising runways where a go-around would exacerbate a problem - Pan due fuel comes into that category. It basically means 15nm ahead of you rather than the extra mile or so that we have historically given you. 15 miles is 5 medium sized movements.
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