Originally Posted by Livesinafield
Is anyone else finding it really hard to believe why a professional pilot with some degree of experience would be happy flying to an aerodrome and arriving with approx 7 minutes of fuel until engines stop working at night?
I'm not a pilot, but spent years in responsible positions in very high-value, high-technology factories. A lesson there is that maintenance of even the most critically important equipment was less likely to be successful for aspects of operation not having any impact in normal circumstances.
Obviously normal fleet operation does not involve frequent exploration of the zero-fuel end of fuel-state operations. I wonder whether there are plausible failure modes which might have introduced a modest zero-offset in the fuel readout of this aircraft, and whether (possibly slopply) maintenance and normal operational experience might have left that error in place for weeks.
If such an error was already in place on previous excessive range flights, all concerned might not have detected just how close those flights came to exhaustion. If the error was in place on this flight, alerts and indications may have come later than people posting on this thread are assuming.
Since normal operations seem unlikely to verify the zero-fuel readout point directly, what special procedure or maintenance is done which would catch such an error? How frequently?
None of which is in any way to suggest such an error as a primary cause here, but specifically a possible explanation to some of the late-stage lack of urgency.