Well gents, personally I think the original poster did us all a favour.
Recent company much excepted, I would very much like to know what exactly makes some of you captains think you are qualified to cut these figures to the bone and ensure an acceptable safety regime at the same time? In a world of constantly changing variables in your environment, you are taking an awful lot for granted.
I passed the same double-digit number of JAA ATPL Theory exams that I assume you did, in the same surprisingly short 6 months from start to finish with or without much revision being necessary to get 75% in the multiple guess, and I don't recall there being anything in the process of obtaining the passes that would remotely qualify me to make decisions to cut fuel load as fine as some of you guys say you routinely do.
And you didn't get really get schooled and tested on these fine niceties of fuel management before you got your CPL/IR either, now did you?
So it must be something you got schooled and tested in and become absolute experts in later on, ... so that would be when you did your type rating course??
No? Too busy learning other important stuff? Or maybe yes, partially?
Oh so what we are really talking about is all that right hand seat experience under various LHS mentors, plus all that line training and sim stuff, not forgetting company SOPs that you learned from ? And how to keep the employer happy and yourself challenged and meaningfully engaged? The
been there done that kind of stuff?
Real Slim, I still think I'd trust you to be spot on your numbers, because your declared MO means you recall them to your immediate grasp far more easily than most, but really, I do think it does no good here to suggest all pilots are as on the ball as you might be with these profit-critical parts of the latest guises of the job.
I have seen enough stupid mistakes littering these pages recently, and been personally subjected to rushed departures, without having to imagine you all thinking twice about fuel and then thinking twice again for MOL about
how to manage to leave maximum air in your tanks by the time you've taxied in on one engine on the return sector.
Over the years, this question has arisen time and time again on PPRuNe. The answer is still the same. It has nothing to do with being green or saving fuel to do your job right. You fly jets for crying out loud. You certainly ain't ever going to come close to being greener than anyone other than Lewis Hamilton on a good day
, and he actually only burns a few hundred kilos a couple of afternoons a fortnight during the summer, not double digit tonnes up the spouts, morning noon and night, nor does he do his bit of early morning overcast seeding like you so obviously do.
So, as for he rest of you, I don't care what you think your job is in relation to this thread, but it certainly is not clever to set out to save such miserly amounts of fuel by cutting the fuel loads down to limits of a hundreds of kilos when your powered flying machine weighs fifty to a hundred times more and can burn the lot very fast if you have to go around, hang around and then divert because your runway just got blocked 30 seconds before you expected to feel good about a perfectly managed return sector, particularly if there another twenty of your homebound colleagues all needing to divert in the same half hour. Yes, I am sure your ATC colleagues would help you all out of such a bind, but a lot of adrenalin would get released to manage it, wouldn't it?
Leave the latest profit maximising ideas to your accountants, let them put the prices up a bit. Meanwhile get yourselves a proper union membership instead of shouting the odds here like competing mercenary special forces, and pass all company memos suggesting you tighten up on your fuel consumption through a strong union and send copies to CHIRP as a matter of routine. Oh, ... I suppose you can't be doing any of that? ... goes against a certain grain ?
Well whatever you decide is right, please don't come here and call people like me who pay your wages morons and bashers. We have partially schooled brains too.