... had me sweating!
Last year in May I took a trip to Northern Cyprus (NC) flying Turkish Airlines out of Stansted, as part of NC political set up all flights in and out of NC must first touch down in Turkey before heading off to their destinations, the flight into NC was all OK, however the flight back was interesting ... We took off from Ercan and set down in Dalaman as part of the required Turkish leg of the journey before setting back off to Stansted, we dropped some people off and took some people on at Dalaman, I was a passenger on this flight by the way! ... the flight was quite quiet this day so I had a row of seats to myself so was engrossed in my book when I noticed few passengers were getting quite irate with the cabin crew and were 'ranting' in Turkish about the delay in taking off (not that I'd noticed being into my book) I looked out of the window and noticed all the aircraft around us had come and gone, at this point I started taking notice of the aircraft movements on the ground, all were tracking to the south of the airfield and taking off into wind towards the north this clarified by the windsock which I could clearly see ... after sometime the Captain came on and told us the delay was due to the aircraft being too heavy and we were waiting for a bowser to come and pump fuel off the aircraft!!!? ... we then had to land in Germany to take more fuel on thus delaying the flight even more .. the bowser duly turned up but never coupled up and never took any fuel off .... very quickly after this the cabin rushed round to get the aircraft reay for take off and we very quickly got pushed back and started tracking the the North of the airfield?? I thought maybe he was going to taxi down the runway turn into wind and take off to the North .... er NO! He turned at the North end of the runway and as turning give full throttle and we were off heading south with the wind!!??! again verified by the windsock as we passed it!
Believe me we used every single inch of runway and he dragged this aircraft kicking and screaming into the air taking off with a very low angle of attack over the water and he kept this attitude until way over water before he started to increase his climb rate ... Why???
My thought is that he knew he was heavy so took off towards the sea knowing that if he had to abort and it all went wrong the sea was a better option than the mountains to the North ... any thoughts??
PS we didn't land in Germany!