Three Ryanair "emergency" landings in Valencia on same day

[sean1982]

Did anyone also tell you guys the LAN actually had an engine flame out because of being low on fuel, yet everyone is bitching about 1 out of 3 FR planes being 75kg below minimum fuel requirements. Strange one that, isn't it???

[Passenger]

Those who say this was just a minor incident should read again what tolipanebas wrote a few days ago:

Very briefly: in general, the law requires a commercial plane to always be able to reach its intended alternate and land there with a minimum of 30 minutes of (holding) fuel still left in the tanks after landing, at any time throuout its flight. If needed, the alternate and/or destination need to be changed in flight so as to always comply with this rule. If this can't be done for whatever reason, the captain needs to declare a mayday without any delay and ask for priority handling by ATC to get on the ground ASAP, which is exactly what they did.
As such,legally these cases were handled correctly by the crew, but the problematic thing is they had to declare a mayday because technicaly they broke the rule of making sure to have 30min of fuel left after landing at their alternate.
Now, you can say they weren't supposed to know there would be additional delays at VLC, but let's be real here: FR is not the only airline operating at MAD and MAD is not just a regional airport FR is so keen on, so if MAD is closed, you better do not count on being able to operate right up to the legal minimum; If everybody starts doing that, then VLC would have to issue a sequence number for arrivals with a mayday even!
So either those flights should have taken on board additional holding fuel before leaving, have selected an alternate nearer to MAD during their holding at MAD, or diverted sooner to VLC, possiby a combination of all 3 even, rather than fly out with the minimum legal, wait at MAD till that absolute minimum is reached, divert to the planned alternate and then rely on a priority handling over there, because by doing exactly this, they have shifted their self induced fuel problem on to other airplanes which are also on a diversion and now needed to make room for them and might have been running low on fuel too.
In short:these incidents have shown poor planning by FR, poor flight follow up by the crews, yet correct problem solving from the same crews, but far more importantly also far better planning and flight follow up by all other airlines and their crews also heading to VLC under exactly the same conditions so none of them were put into additional problems because of FR's somewhat egocentric attitude of not sufficiently taking into account the expected traffic density at their planned alternate in their flight plan and fuel calculations.
The obvious conclusion should be that if an airport like MAD, LHR, CDG or FRA closes down completely, it is utterly naive to expect that you wil be cleared for a straight in landing at whatever alternate you go to, so the theoretical rule of minimum legal fuel just won't be enough in the real world. Seems like FR either dont fully grasp this common wisdom, or decided to simply ignore it because there's no legal requirement to take the reality of the day and place into consideration.

[sean1982]

and the god of aviation is always right off course shall we talk about the LAN now??

[Passenger]

shall we talk about the LAN now??

Sure, I'm looking forward to it. So feel free to write whatever you want about that incident. It seems to be quite important, so perhaps you or airazuxtor can open a seperate topic for that incident?

No, let's be serious, shall we? An error from another airline can not - can never - be accepted as excuse to clear Ryanair for its dangerous company policy about take off weight and fuel consumption.

[Airbus330lover]

and the god of aviation is always right off course shall we talk about the LAN now??

Lan 1-Ryanair 3
Match finished

[airazurxtror]

An error from another airline can not - can never - be accepted as excuse to clear Ryanair

Sure - but why single out Ryanair ? (five pages already, and going on)
Self-explaining answer : because Ryanair is a dangerous competitor for brussels airlines.
Which LAN is not ...

As to the alleged "dangerous" policy of Ryanair - from "The Aviation Herald" :

While ICAO recommends to recognize a "minimum fuel" declaration in order to indicate to air traffic control that any unexpected delay might create an emergency situation on board, Europe has no legal foundation for such a minimum fuel declaration as the French BEA recently reported in one of their final reports, see Report: Cityjet RJ85 at Basel/Mulhouse on Jun 17th 2010, fuel emergency. Standard operating procedures therefore require, that crews declare emergency in order to prevent any further delays at the latest, when landing above final fuel reserve is no longer ensured. Minimum fuel declarations as well as emergency calls as result of being low on fuel thus happen regularly around the planet following weather related holdings and diversions.

[Homo Aeroportus]

...shall we talk about the LAN now??

LAN705 landed after another flight that had been given priority having declared a fuel emergency.

H.A.

[sean1982]

and the god of aviation is always right off course shall we talk about the LAN now??

Lan 1-Ryanair 3
Match finished

Which ones of the FR's had a flame out due to being low on fuel? Oh right, none

Passenger, please comment about "dangerous" policies once you actually know something about modern airline operations.

[Inquirer]

Yet isn't this proof of how dangerous it is for others, if some airlines make it a habbit of asking for emergency priority because they have a corporate policy not to take more fuel than absolutely needed?

The one calling mayday because he's running ou of fuel might make it on the ground safely all right, but all the others in line are having to move aside for him and wait for their turn even longer!

[sean1982]

Inquirer, "some airlines" do not have the policy of taking only as much as absolutely needed. For example on friday we took 800kg on top of plog fuel due to some trouble in BCN. Nothing was needed to "convince" the airline to except that. A little note on the flightplan with a reason and that's it. No captain is gonna want to fly around running low on fuel risking that he is not going to make it to a nearest airport.

[Bracebrace]

And how much of that 800kgs did you need at the end? Because everybody talks about taking extra fuel, but ask any pilot how many times that extra fuel he took was actually needed and not many will have an answer.

Take a Ryanair fleet of 200 aircraft on the European network, they do 3 rotations or 6 flights a day. That is 1200 flights. Each flight takes merely 200kg extra (happens quickly with actual payload lower than estimated payload numbers but we hardly ever reduce trip fuel for it don't we?), that is 240000kg of fuel transported. This is a REALLY bad day, so let's say 20% is actually used (although, looking at large amounts of flight logs, I can only conclude not much of extra fuel is used because landing fuel numbers were all the time largely above minimum diversion fuel numbers... read less than 5%), that means on one day, 192000kg of fuel was transported for no use at all. In 737 numbers you are looking at more than 10 full freight payloads on one single day. You want to know the cost of that? If you take the number on a daily basis, you can handle of couple of diversions...

For the rest I only refer to my previous posts, interesting day, but nothing unsafe.

[Stij]

Bracebrace,

If a captain thinks it's neccesary to take extra fuel to guarantee his pax safety he should take extra fuel... Period!

Oh, and as a pax: I happen to like to arrive at my planned destination instead of diverting and if that includes taking extra fuel I consider that to be part of the game for the airliner. And yes, I know what diverting mean: I've flown Charleroi - Treviso and back enough in wintertime before the ILS was installed: Enough to know very well where the rental car desks in Brescia and Trieste were before they were FR destinations from CRL.

Cheers,

Stij

[tolipanebas]

Take a Ryanair fleet of 200 aircraft on the European network, they do 3 rotations or 6 flights a day. That is 1200 flights. Each flight takes merely 200kg extra (happens quickly with actual payload lower than estimated payload numbers but we hardly ever reduce trip fuel for it don't we?), that is 240000kg of fuel transported. This is a REALLY bad day, so let's say 20% is actually used (although, looking at large amounts of flight logs, I can only conclude not much of extra fuel is used because landing fuel numbers were all the time largely above minimum diversion fuel numbers... read less than 5%), that means on one day, 192000kg of fuel was transported for no use at all. In 737 numbers you are looking at more than 10 full freight payloads on one single day. You want to know the cost of that? If you take the number on a daily basis, you can handle of couple of diversions...

Mind you, it's not because you take more fuel than was needed in the end, that all of that fuel is lost.
If the extra fuel isn't needed, you'll simply land with (most of it) still in your tanks.

Now, transporting fuel costs (some) fuel too indeed, so let me make a guess here: based on the sector length of the flight, it will cost you between 5 and 10% of the extra fuel to have it with you, so let's say that flying those 192t of unneeded fuel you've talked about will have cost FR roughly 14t.
At today's prices, that means roughly 12,000 euro for the whole fleet.
Devide this by 1,200 flights like you've said and it gives you a cost of just 10 euro per flight...

[RoMax]

And how much of that 800kgs did you need at the end? Because everybody talks about taking extra fuel, but ask any pilot how many times that extra fuel he took was actually needed and not many will have an answer.

Take a Ryanair fleet of 200 aircraft on the European network, they do 3 rotations or 6 flights a day. That is 1200 flights. Each flight takes merely 200kg extra (happens quickly with actual payload lower than estimated payload numbers but we hardly ever reduce trip fuel for it don't we?), that is 240000kg of fuel transported. This is a REALLY bad day, so let's say 20% is actually used (although, looking at large amounts of flight logs, I can only conclude not much of extra fuel is used because landing fuel numbers were all the time largely above minimum diversion fuel numbers... read less than 5%), that means on one day, 192000kg of fuel was transported for no use at all. In 737 numbers you are looking at more than 10 full freight payloads on one single day. You want to know the cost of that? If you take the number on a daily basis, you can handle of couple of diversions...

There's indeed a cost at transporting extra fuel, and in almost all cases you will not need it (or not all of it). But that's just safety, you always have to think about worst case scenario when flying an aircraft with tens/hundreds of people.
It's not that there is a kind of magic ball in the cockpit telling you if you'll need the feul or not. Because as you may know, most crashes happen unpredicted.

Some good exemples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378
Yes in these cases other things went wrong too, but that's a crash, most of the times it's a combination of events. I'm damn sure that if aircraft didn't took so many back-up fuel A LOT more emergencies and even accidents would occure. You know, safety measures are not to save money, or for the daily operations, it's (in most of the cases) a back-up when things go wrong...

(btw, this is not in reaction on the RYR events, I stayed out of that discussion, and I'll keep doing that)

[Passenger]

Passenger, please comment about "dangerous" policies once you actually know something about modern airline operations.

As far as I know you don't know me, so please restrain for personal attacks. Actually, I do have practical experience up there - and no, I'm not referring to the MH club - and no, it was not with a Belgian airline.

That said: can we now stick to the facts please? The handling of fuel emergency call itself was textbook. But there it ends. To land without minimum fuel was crew error. Actually, I prefer "without legally required minimum fuel”, because that makes clear it is not just pro forma, but a legal obligation.

Far more important however is the cause of the three incidents: company policy, pressure on the crew to take calculated risks, pressure on the crew to save Euro’s on flight operations where other airlines don’t.

Four recent incidents proof that Ryanair is taking calculated risks: these three fuel emergencies and the taxiway collision at Madrid. Calculated risks are against the basic aviation rule I’ve learned three decades ago: “if you think you can do it, you can’t. You must be sure”.

I understand why many companies forbit their staff to fly Ryanair.

[airazurxtror]

I understand why many companies forbit their staff to fly Ryanair.

If they forbid their staff to fly Ryanair for safety reasons, I guess that they still more forcibly forbid their staff to fly Air France, who has one of the worst security records in Europ and has caused hundreds of their customers to pass away ?

[teddybAIR]

OMG!!!

5 pages of hypothesis without anyone trying to first summarize the factual information. The fact of the matter is that we don't have sufficient information to judge the crew performance, period! All we know is that they landed with the legal required minimum amount of fuel at their second alternate airport. But we lack critical information to truly judge the situation:

> FOB?
> Contingency over legal requirements?
> How long where they in the hold?
> At what point did the first aircraft declare its fuel emergency?
> When did ATC communicate the extra 10 - 20 mins holding time?
> What was the impact of this extra delay on the different flights and their ability to remain legally compliant?
> What was the fuel status of the flights by then?
> How long where they holding by then?
> What where the expectations as to arrival time of the different FR crews at that specific moment in time?
> Was a landing sequence already established?
> I could go on for quite some time here, but I think the point is clear: we don't have the necessary information at this point...that's the only valid conclusion one can draw today

So let's be patient and wait for a first report with factual information, shall we?

[teddybAIR]

...but ask any pilot how many times that extra fuel he took was actually needed and not many will have an answer.

With that logic we can also forget about emergency exits, life jackets, oxygen masks, fire extinguishers, emergency lighting, RAM turbines, etc. Let's strip 'em all and save some fuel burn!

[jan_olieslagers]

Two postings of yours, TeddyBair, and for as little as I know of commercial air transportation I can entirely agree with both. No surprise of course, you are a pilot and have learned to look at things matter-of-factly.

[jan_olieslagers]

I understand why many companies forbid (sic!) their staff to fly Ryanair.

Must have more to do with FR's cancellation policy. The risk of seeing an employee disappear is low, and not much different among airlines, so I suppose employers wouldn't bother. OTOH no company wants to see its staff turning up late after a business trip.