I don't know whether this is the right place to post this (I'm sure it will get moved to the correct place if not).
This is not intended as a witch hunt (far from it). I am merely looking for an aircrew perspective to something that happened whilst I was controlling the LAM hold today.....
Delays into Heathrow were 10-15 mins and the stack contained a/c at FL80 up to FL160. I was informed by an adjacent sector that a/c X only had 9 minutes of 'holding fuel'. When the a/c was told of the delay, the response was that "We should be OK". The a/c was handed to me at FL170 but I had an inkling that this was not the end of the story.
The next 5 minutes were uneventful, however, on entering the hold at FL150, a/c X informed me that the next time over LAM, he wished to divert to SS. Seeing no point in him continuing around the hold, I put him on a heading for a downwind join at SS. This he completed with no further incident.
Questions:
1) Why not declare
an emergency and get a priority approach into LL? (even from LAM when he requested to divert the track distance would have been half of that required to land at SS)
2) Surely the impact of having the passengers and aeroplane at the wrong airport is greater than declaring an emergency?
As I said at the start, no witch hunt intended, just curious as to why this decision was taken when it was apparent to me that a more expeditious approach (and therefore less fuel burn) was available.
Edited to eliminate semantics in a vain attempt to stick to the point
