Many, many years go, when I was a young pilot, there was an incident in where I live, with Airbus A300's. Company was Karair, at that time a charter subsidiary of Finnair, they had two A300's, with highest utilisation of the type then, basically flying non-stop between Finland and the Canary Islands. About 18 hours airborne per day per aircraft, if I recall correctly. At some point, it was discovered that there was a huge chunk of ice floating in the fuel tank of one of the aircraft, as the condenced water never had time to melt, and thus had never been drained from the system between the flights. The aircraft had actually been very close to fuel starvation because of this. Of course, about 20 years have passed, lessons have been learnt, and this could not happen again, couldn't it...?
Now this rings a bell.
I think about 10 years ago Continental had an issue with their early 777s in that during winter ops from NWK the fuel temp never dropped sufficiently to allow any suspended/solid water to thaw and therefore be drained during normal routine checks. Result was a very large, thick sheet of ice in the base of the fuel tanks which would often give erroneous tank qty readings.
I have no idea if this has anything to do with recent events. I just wanted to comment on the above quote.
BTW. I heard Danny on BBC R2 today. Excellent. Kept to the facts as known and refrained from speculation. However, as soon as Danny had signed off the R2 DJ, Jeremy Vine, then asked the listeners to "ring in with tales of any near miss experiences they had".
