I'm no fan of Ryanair, the contrary in fact. However, it would appear that a sensible decision was made by the crew by diverting to a suitable airport.

As someone has pointed out, "suitable" can mean a lot of things. If I have the option, I will always go to an airport with which I am familiar ahead of one I have never visited. It removes a layer of risk.

The other extreme can be summed up in the Airbus QRH drill for Smoke/Fumes/Avionics Smoke. There is a line which says "If at anytime the situation becomes UNMANAGEABLE (not shouting, just copying verbatim): IMMEDIATE LANDING .... CONSIDER.

That is a worst case which means if there is a suitable strip of concrete, that's where you go. If not, find a field.... :eek:

If not, find a field.... :eek:

Like these guys did?

Alrosa Mirny Air Enterprise Flight 514 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As an aside...
 

From the linked page:

Over here they would busy themselves trying to get hold of their lawyers instead. :E

" After evacuating the aircraft and whilst awaiting rescue, some of the passengers searched for mushrooms, a popular pastime in Russia."

"Over here they would busy themselves trying to get hold of their lawyers instead. "

Hmmm...mushrooms vs. lawyers....mushrooms=keep them in the dark and feed them BS. Lawyers.......WHAT, exactly, is the difference?? :p

You don't have to mortgage the house to pay the mushroom. :(

I actually wonder if the person who started this thread actually stopped to ask the opinion of the passengers involved?

Had he been in charge, they would have been back in Beziers within minutes with no spare aircraft in sight and a very long wait for a replacement.

Not only did the crew take them to Gerona, an airfield with much better facilities in every sense, FR keep 5 or 6 aircraft based there so the chances of getting home to Bristol were therefore much higher.

All this emotive talk about "200 kms through the mountains" is just so much garbage. Gerona airfield either meets Performance A standards or it doesn't. If it doesn't then no one would ever land there in a public transport aircraft!

I have probably dealt with more engine failures than you have had hot dinners.

Who said they flew to Gerona on one engine?

It is my understanding that they did not.

Engine fire or severe damage; then go straight back into Beziers - no question; but that was simply not the case here.

Nearest suitable, is what it says : suitable it does not say available or ASAP.

The airport that ticks most of the boxes that is. That day on the crew decision it was Gerona.

If you run a loft scenario in the north east corner of france, with different crew pairing ( Belgium, swiss, german and french) You will see that depending from their country of origin, the suitable airport is different ( everything else being equal), and guess what ? they get home !! even if it takes a bit longer, their confidence level is high enough in order to balance the decision in favour of the home country.

I do not know that case at all, but if the crew was going regularly there, this would explain the decision to go southbound, when initial destination was more like north...

I concur, nearest suitable airfield is the airfield that the commander decides is the nearest suitable...............end of!

End of Arguement....

(FCTM = Flight Crew Training Manual for you flight simmers, plane spotters and trainee wannabes out there)

Mmmmm.... I think you must be doing something wrong:eek: In over 20 years of flying I've had one engine fail on take-off and one IFS (and they were both ruddy piston engines too:ok:)
As for hot dinners - well, I haven't got several thousand fingers and toes to count on:p

But that's exactly the point young man. Aeroplanes and engines are so much more reliable nowadays so your chances of having to shut an engine down for real are consequently much reduced.

I suppose that this is why it is considered such a big deal nowadays.

A useful thread outlining the decision process that one should go through when an in-flight emergency occurs.

The question of "nearest suitable airport" I think, all things considered, is a matter of time.

If you have two airports with equal weather and facilities then the one that is closer is probably the most suitable. However if your at 30,000' and that airfield is 60nms away then inevitably one would have to hold or take extended vectors.

The airport that is further away may turn out to be more "suitable" after all.

Flying any longer than is necessary with an engine that is shut-down or damaged is in my opinion irresponsible.

What a jolly charming thing to say:ok:

I don't think an engine shut-down is a such big deal as some point out, as you say, unless you're in the middle of an ETOPS sector with monsoon Seychelles and monsoon Male as your alternates - but still, got to have some fun sometime heh?
And I flew a lot of old aeroplanes with old engines too just so ya know:ok::ok:

For D O Guerrero............

With three stages, it had MANY. The Saturn V unofficial nickname was "Cluster's Last Stand".All those engines were needed just to get the payload into a parking orbit.

But the vast majority of the trip was conducted with only ONE engine present.That single engine was in the Service Module.After the TLI, that's all there was to get them there and back.

( The lone exception to that of course was the use of the LEM descent engine on Apollo 13.)

From WikiPedia.........

" After one and a half orbits, the S-IVB third-stage engine pushed the spacecraft onto its trajectory toward the Moon with the Trans Lunar Injection burn at 16:22:13 UTC. About 30 minutes later the command/service module pair separated from this last remaining Saturn V stage and docked with the lunar module still nestled in the Lunar Module Adaptor. After the lunar module was extracted, the combined spacecraft headed for the Moon, while the third stage booster flew on a trajectory past the moon and into solar orbit.[7] "

RJ

Passenger viewpoint
 

re: I actually wonder if the person who started this thread actually stopped to ask the opinion of the passengers involved?

I was on this flight. In retrospect, we were fairly pleased with the decision taken, though while it was happening, we had no idea of the seriousness of the situation. All the passengers and flight attendants went very quiet and there was no movement around. The noise and vibration from the starboard engine was very loud, almost from engine start up, and it was clear that plane could not climb properly. Some passengers noted from the sunset that we had turned round and were heading for Spain. The availability of another aircraft at Girona (being prepared for the flight next morning) was a bonus for us.

If I have any complaint, it might be that we would have liked a little more information. We all knew something was wrong. But the crew obviously were busy; they made the right decision and landed safely. We thank them for that.

More information is at:
Incident: Ryanair at Beziers on Sep 18th 2010, bird strike

regards,
Dave

White Knight:

"Mmmmmm....I think you must be doing something wrong".

I have been thinking about that comment and thinking about how life is now compared to what it was then.

One huge change nowadays is that we don't actually go around shutting engines down in the real aeroplane (except on air tests) but instead do all that sort of stuff in the simulator. Even on type-rating base training, the offending engine is normally reduced to flight idle and a touch drill completed.

I spent 18 years flying for Mrs Windsor and about 16 years of that was spent on 4 engined turboprops. We did training in the real aircraft on a monthly basis and engines were shut down completely - not brought back to flight idle.

For a fair few years, I was a training captain and would go flying around by day and by night with 2 or 3 F/Os each of whom had to complete an EFATO, 3 Eng G/A and 3 Eng Landing.

I personally did not have any problems with this set up but there were a lot of training accidents in the RAF caused by actually shutting engines down. Sometimes more aircraft were lost during training flights than were lost in normal operations. The Canberra springs to mind.

If my memory serves me right, the big change came around the end of the 1970s and simulated engine failures (coming back to idle) became the flavour of the month.

So, I probably HAVE shut down more engines than some of our brethern have had hot dinners but the vast majority of them (but not all) were of the pre-planned variety!

The correct decision was made in my view, no fire, engine still operable, good judgement used in choice of alternate.
Was this was a birdstike though ? from the cockpit those symptoms would fit the incident certainly, but then we have accounts of unusual noises from startup, and the company declining to comment.

I am not a great fan of conspiracy theories, however, birdstrikes often leave bird remains, a runway inspection would follow an incident such as this.

89 nm? Even at 210kt that equates to just 25nm - more like 22 minutes at 250kt.

That, to me, sounds like a nice time frame in which to finish off QRH drills, go through the decision making and planning processes, brief ATC, Cabin Crew, Ops, do your performance calculations and approach briefing, complete the Descent checklist and fly the approach.

The nearest airport is not always the most suitable and dumping it back on the runway at BZR would not have been a whole lot quicker (if the preparations had been completed fully).

It sounds like a perfectly reasonable course of action to me (based upon what little information we have available here).