"Manchester has decent road connections to Leeds!" Yes it's a motorway called the M62 BUT it is not always an easy journey and in poor vis at LBA you can bet the M62 "Britains highest motorway " will be foggy at best closed due to an accident at worst. If LBA was on LVPs and the wind was in favour of 14 then LBA is only as good as MME ie Cat 1 unless you can take a tailwind onto 32 which is CAT3. MME and DSA are Cat 1 as far as I know but MAN is Cat 3. Jet2 seem to favour MME as although not a base it is less busy and the journey back to LBA is often quicker than MAN.

AltFlaps was spot on here and seems to have been ignored. The very worst that could have happened was a landing with a vis 10% below minima. Don't forget a Capt can do whatever he sees fit to ensure the safety of the a/c. And if the vis had got worse below 1000' rather than above he'd have continued anyway (the 50m less would, in reality, make no difference to whether he got his vis ref). "Aaaaannnnnnddddd Ddddddddeeeeeecccciiddddeeee..."
Continuing below 1000' on a UK ILS with 500m vis on a runway is not exactly test-pilot stuff now is it - it would have been a very quick tea and biccies.
All of the above assumes the worst case (ie bu**er all fuel). By the sounds of it that wasn't even the case. A non event IMHO.

You guys are incredible.

Landing below minimums at a dodgy alternate, simply to cover up a bad decision, when there was ALWAYS a much better choice available???

'And when we get to decision height, I will say Decide very slowly'

- 'Absolutely no problem at all. I'll just say Go Around very quickly!'

Some of you guys are real cowboys.

Edited to say ... ;)

Around 5 years ago Russian "Sibir Airlines" (now S7 Airlines) TU204 on the way from Frankfurt to Novosibirsk has diverted twice, first from Novosibisrk due to low visibility, then from Kemerovo(?) due to excessive crosswind and on approach to Omsk both engines quit due to dry tanks. Glided from someting like 3500ft and overran the runway on landing (no fatalities).
To make this story short - sometimes you should have the balls to break landing minimas...

And sometimes glider practice is handy!

Try to find a film called "Always"

I highly recommend it.

The general view seems to be that the crew did nothing wrong and that this is a non event. However we can all learn from situations like this. From my perspective either:

1. They believed they had plenty of fuel, decided to have a look at Teesside and then finally landed at Newcastle with a reasonable amount remaining (2 tons was suggested). In this case they are probably regretting making a pan call (at least if they have ever heard of Pprune)!

2. They were getting close to alternate fuel, diverted to Teesside and realised a bit late it was not going to work. The latter scenario is less professional, but they got away with it.

Why they thought it necessary to make the pan call if they landed with 2 tons remaining is an interesting question. Perhaps they confused minimum alternate fuel, often around 2 tons and final reserve fuel which would be about 1.2 tons? Or maybe in the high workload situation a little 'finger trouble' with the fmc made them think they would arrive with less than was actually the case?

Landing below reported minimums is definitely not a good idea at least on the tea without biscuits front, and has been covered in detail on other threads. Obviously busting limits is better than crashing. But nobody so far has provided any evidence they were anywhere near running out of fuel.

One thing is busting the minima on an emergency and quite another with a wide open alternate 50 miles away and over 2tons (ie almost one hour) in the tanks. Not for me thanks.

Have to agree with Calpyso. You can break the minima in an emergency but this wasn't an emergency.

Good CRM?
 

Intresting thread. With an aircraft in the hold at the operators main base, do I here "Commercial pressures" in the decision making process of the crew with regard to the decision to divert and to where?

There will always be commerical pressures regarding where you end up, but in the 2 years i have been at Jet2 i have never flown with a Captain forced to take plog fuel or less fuel than they have decided to take. Quite often it is the captain that eggs ME on to take more.

Each company has it's own rules and culture, but fuel planning isn't one of the bad points at Jet2. :ok:

Don't think anyone has criticised how much fuel they took off with.

Just whether they used it wisely?

N707,

can you speak a plane English buddy....???

Having been the subject of a Pprune "post mortem" myself on one occasion, I can imagine how the crew involved must feel at this dissection of their actions and so will offer no further comment on that day's events but this thread seems to have taken a rather alarming turn in a different direction.

I refer to the rather glib suggestions that one should just "bust minimums" as if it were only a case of operating outside the legal remit and so may have to endure an interview with tea and biccies (or tea and no biccies or even no tea and no biccies etc).There is so much more to such a decision than whether or not you are breaking the law (national; international or simply company).

Do those suggesting such actions ever consider why an NDB approach has higher minima than a localiser approach or why a LOC/DME has higher than Cat1 and why that is higher than Cat 2 etc etc.? Do they ever consider that these minima are there because obstacles in the Missed Approach path or cone or funnel or whatever are taken into consideration because the aeroplane may NOT be smack in line with Runway centreline upon reaching minima due to the vagaries/tolerances associated with the approach aid in use? Why does Cat 3B not require a DH? In other words the specific minima exist, in many cases, to save lives (your lives) not just to save an interview with the top man.

Of course NONE of this applies if you have no other safer options such as uncontrollable smoke, no fuel reserves at all, nowhere else to go etc. but even those reasons don't guarantee you'll be safe but it may be your ONLY option and if your ONLY option was to fly a manual ILS right down to the runway in zero vis then you would give it your best shot because you have NO other options.

Gosh havnt you got big writing, do you feel insecure?

llanfairpg

I am genuinely sorrry, that was all you could take from my post and have to confess on re-reading it this morning, it may even come accross as pompous. This was not my intention but it happens to be an area I feel particularly stongly about. I hope the slight edit will reset the focus on what I believe are important points

I cannot think of another profession where a bad day at the office (not a major incident) becomes the subject of such public scrutiny.

Okay, under a different thread I've rubbished some decision-making at the CAA, but we haven't a clue who made it and anyway it was the result of a decision that was considered, not made against a critical time restraint. It may have wasted public money.

In this case, our comments are targeting one specific crew. They know who they are and so must dozens of other pilots. They made a decision to the best of their ability and many of us may have made the same one, and here we are analysing their every move. To have thousands of the general public and journo sharks lapping it all up makes it 100 times worse.

Perhaps I'm just too thin-skinned, but if I was on this crew reading all this stuff I would probably be so demoralised that I would hang up my headset and call it a day.

We have the option of reading Pprune or not. This crew have no option as to whether they appear on Pprune, and like it or not they are here in big red lights.

Pprune has achieved communication that would have been unheard of ten years ago and is of huge benefit to our professional community in so many ways. But we are now using it (unwittingly) to throw one of our number to the lions with the crowds cheering from the sidelines. Is this what we really want?

From the information given it seems the crew did not break any rules, and landed at an alternate with a fair sum of fuel. They may have been a bit hasty with a pan call, but thats an area where the full facts are unknown. At worst it was a conservative decision. If thats the worst I would be accused of in my career I would be very happy!

Bigbusdriver06

"To have thousands of the general public and journo sharks lapping it all up makes it 100 times worse."


Speaking as General Public, I would have no problem flying with this airline or this crew after reading this thread. A difficult situation appears to my untrained eye to have been handled professionally. It is reassuring to know that this and many other incidents related here are handled with professionalism and in safety.

It is for you the Pilots to make your opinions known and where you make it clear that there is no issue there can surely be no issue as far as the customer is concerned!

I sincerely hope that helps a little.

Thank you ISO, that does start to turn things positive.

Right Way Up, okay but there are others here examining the minutae and opening up cracks which some of us might gloss over. I still wouldn't like to be the victim!

There's also an Air Safety issue. How many of us will now think of Pprune first before declaring a PAN?