That is very exceptional. I've written fuel estimation software for airliners (cargo, fortunately), and the number of rules regarding go-arounds, alternates and holding time resulted in there usually being quite a bit of fuel in the tanks on landing, by design. I've never heard of '6 minutes left' in practice where it wasn't a massive issue and the investigation into how this could have happened will make for interesting reading. A couple of notes: the wind and the time spent on the three go-arounds + what was necessary to get to the alternate may not be the whole story here, that's actually factored in before you even take off.
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
The context you're missing is that Ryanair have routinely declared fuel emergencies in the past, and it seems an operational tactic - they want to carry less fuel to burn less fuel, and then have to regularly mayday to jump the stack on inbound, saving cash. That's not covered in the article, but you can sure as hell expect the CAA are going to take another look at them and their operations planning.
On this one, they did 3 attempted landings at Prestwick. [Edit: I now see that the third attempt was at EDI] What happened between the first and the second landing that made them think on their second go-around that a third attempt was more likely to succeed than the previous two? Was the wind dying down, or was the captain just feeling a bit braver or stupider? [Edit: I'm still curious as to what information they gathered that landing conditions were significantly different at EDI to make that diversion, given its relatively close and so likely to have similar weather].
Why was their final reserve Manchester when there were literally dozens of closer suitable airports, at least some of which are likely to have had better wind conditions by virtue of lower gusts, or more aligned to runway direction so not dealing with a strong crosswind?
There are many reasons I won't fly Ryanair, but not least because they have been shown over and over again to make reckless planning and operational decisions, and they are fortunate to have not had hull losses as a result. Time is ticking down, variance will catch them one day, and a sad & tragic catastrophe is only a matter of time. People will go to prison as a result, because this pattern of behaviour shows that this isn't "bad luck", it's calculated risk taking with passenger and crew lives to save money.
I once had a board member who was also on the board of Ryan Air, and he casually told me a story about when their CEO gave a presentation on adding a credit card -powered interlock on the cabin lavatories. He told them, “They’re my planes and if you have the nerve to shit in them you should have to pay for the cleanup”.
My colleague thought he was portraying the CEO as a cool guy and decisive manager, but I thought the guy sounds like a sociopath.
Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
On a nominally 2h45m flight, they spent an extra 2 hours in the air, presumably doing doing fuel intensive altitude changing maneuvers, and were eventually able to land safely with their reserves almost exhausted.
I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states. The equation is
hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident
Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.)
One such hazardous state we have defined in aviation is "less than N minutes of fuel remaining when landing". If an aircraft lands with less than N minutes of fuel on board, it would only have taken bad environmental conditions to make it crash, rather than land. Thus we design commercial aviation so that planes always have N minutes of fuel remaining when landing. If they don't, that's a big deal: they've entered a hazardous state, and we never want to see that. (I don't remember if N is 30 or 45 or 60 but somewhere in that region.)
For another example, one of my children loves playing around cliffs and rocks. Initially he was very keen on promising me that he wouldn't fall down. I explained the difference between accidents and hazardous states to him in childrens' terms, and he realised slowly that he cannot control whether or not he has an accident, so it's a bad idea to promise me that he won't have an accident. What he can control is whether or not bad environmental conditions lead to an accident, and he does that by keeping out of hazardous states. In this case, the hazardous state would be standing less than a child-height within a ledge when there is nobody below ready to catch. He can promise me to avoid that, and that satisfies me a lot more than a promise to not fall.
As others have said, final fuel reserves are typically at least half an hour, and you shouldn't really be cutting into them. What if their first approach into MAN had led to another go around?
With a major storm heading north-easterly across the UK, the planning should have reasonably foreseen that an airport 56 miles east may also be unavailable, and should've further diverted prior to that point.
They likely used the majority of their final fuel reserve on the secondary diversion from EDI to MAN, presumably having planned to land at their alternate (EDI) around the time they reached the final fuel reserve.
Any CAA report into this, if there is one produced, is going to be interesting, because there's multiple people having made multiple decisions that led to this.
I'm not an aviation expert, but generally in safety engineering, safety buffers are not simply calculated as [normal situation] * [safety factor], but [worst case scenario] * [safety factor]
If you ever cut into your safety allowance, you've already fucked up. Your expected design criteria should account for all use cases, nominal or worst-case. The safety factor is there for safety, it is never intended to be used.
Depends if our goal is to have zero aircraft crashes. If the goal is zero, then for any given parameter, you have to define a margin of safety well before crash territory and treat breaching that margin as seriously as if there had been a crash.
Similarly planes are kept 5 nautical miles apart horizontally, and if they get closer than that, you guessed it - investigation. Ofc planes could come within inches and everyone could live, but if we normalize flying within inches, the we are also normalizing zero safety margin, turning small minor inevitable human failings into catastrophe death & destruction. As an example, planes communicate with ATC over the radio and are given explicit instructions - turn left 20 degrees, fly heading 140 etc. From time to time these instructions are misunderstood and have to be corrected. At 5nm separation everyone involved has plenty of time to notice that something was missed/garbled/misinterpreted etc and correct. At 1 inch separation, there's no such time. Any mistake is fatal, even though in theory you are safe when separated by 1 inch.
TBC an investigation doesn't mean investigating the pilots in order to assign blame, it means investigating the entire aviation system that led up to the breach. The pilot's actions / inaction will certainly be part of that, but the goal is to ask, "How could this have been avoided, and ask how every part of the system that we have some control or influence over might have contributed to the outcome"
Well imagine they had to do a go-around on that landing. Go-arounds are extremely normal and might be done for a million reasons; your speed is wrong, your descent rate is wrong, your positioning is wrong, there's bad wind, there's an issue on the ground, etc etc etc. Six minutes of fuel is really not enough to be sure that you can do a go-around. So now, if ANY of those very normal everyday issues occurs, the pilot has to choose between two very bad options: doing a go-around with almost no fuel, or attempting a landing despite the issue. That's just way too close for comfort.
Aviation operates on a Swiss cheese model; the idea is that you want many many layers of safety (slices of cheese). Inevitably, every layer will have some holes, but with enough layers, you should still be safe; there won't be a hole that goes all the way through. In this case, they basically got down to their very last slice of cheese; it was just luck that the last layer held.
>I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
One of the most important aspects of taking safety seriously is that you do not just investigate things which had an impact, but that you proactively investigate near misses (as was the case here) and even potential incidents.
A plane with 6 minutes of fuel left is always a risk to every person on board and potentially others if an emergency landing becomes the only option.
If they have to touch and go, how long would it take until they get the plane around for another approach? In fact, you might not get as far as that touch and go and have to go around. You need some margin for all of these eventualities. The likelihood is low that these happen, but they have to be accounted for.
This reminds of discussions following the Fukushima disaster where one commenter claimed that it wasn't a design flaw, because it was an extraordinary circumstance. I found this appalling, because I do not at all think that was the risk profile that was sold to the public; I think people believed that it was supposed to be designed to safely survive 1000-year earthquakes and the tsunamis that they create.
Likewise, I think that the flying public is lead to believe fuel exhaustion is so rare that when airlines are compliant with regulations, no such disasters across all flights across all carriers will occur during your lifetime.
6 min, is empty, 6 min is purely theoretical, 6 min would not clear for ground handling or a test start, or a fuel system check,6 min would not do a go around.
will interesting to see if they release info about what the real amount of fuel left is, and an authorative discussion on how much useable flight time was there.
did they actualy make the taxi to the terminal?, or run out on the apron?
Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
I don't remember all of the rules off the top of my head, but if you are ever landing with less than 30 minutes of fuel, something has gone seriously wrong. You are required to take off with sufficient fuel to fly to your destination, hold for a period of time, attempt a landing, fly to your alternate, and land all with 30 minutes remaining. If you are ever in a situation where you may not meet these conditions, you are required to divert immediately. In choosing your alternate, you consider weather conditions along with many other factors. This was, without question, a serious emergency.
From the very brief description in the article, I would say they should have diverted to Manchester at least 25 minutes sooner than they did. I will include the GP's caution, however:
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
My understanding is that they shouldn't have spent that much time in the air (not intended as a guess for the cause). The margin is there for situations where you can't land earlier, not the margin for scheduling the landing. There is margin for expected potential delays, they were in the other margin that should never be used except in true emergencies.
>One pilot who reviewed the log said: “Just imagine that whenever you land with less than 2T (2,000kg) of fuel left you start paying close attention to the situation. Less than 1.5T you are sweating. But this is as close to a fatal accident as possible.”
If at any point you expect to touch down at the nearest safe airport with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, you are required by regulation to make a mayday call.
Mayday is a term enshrined in law. It is only to be used when people will die if you do not receive help. In the US, calling it inappropriately can be punished with up to 10 years in jail and a $250k fine. It's protected in this way because as soon as you call mayday, in many situations there are actions that must be taken by law or regulation. Other appropriate uses include things like "our plane is on fire" or "our wing just fell off and we can't steer the plane".
As soon as you think you can't land with the fuel reserves you are _required_ to call mayday, other pilots are _required_ to clear the radio for you, and ATC is _required_ to provide any and all supported possible until you're on the ground.
The investigation is not to figure out who to send to jail or something. The investigation is because a flight just came this >< close to having hundreds of people die. That fuel is there as a safety margin, yes. That's how everyone ended up walking off this plane instead of dying as the plane was ripped apart by some trees somewhere. That is good.
But air travel did not become as safe as it with an attitude of "this hasn't killed anyone yet, all good". The fact there was an incursion into the safety margin should not be looked at as "eh, working as intended" but "holy hell we just came this close to disaster, what went wrong that almost killed all these people? how do we stop that happening again?". That is what an investigation will be looking to figure out.
To put it in vaguely IT terms, this is something like... your application has started corrupting its database, but you have _a_ backup copy. On one hand, you can think "eh, we have a backup, that's what it's there for, who cares". On the other you can go "holy shit, any time we need to restore from the backup we narrowly averted disaster... how do we make sure we're not in that situation again?". The former is probably going to lead to irrecoverable data loss eventually. The second will have you addressing problems _before_ they ruin you.
Only issue I see is that should there have been stricter rules to diverting way earlier. If winds were such as to make landing harder. Would just directly going somewhere else been the correct choice to force.
> I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
So because the safety margin still worked while down to near vapors we should conclude there's nothing to learn for the future to reduce the risk of similar incidents?
Flight from Edinburgh to Manchester is just a bit more than 1 hour, so after trying 2 landings, diverting to Edinburgh (15-20 minutes flight), 1 more landing attempt, well, you get very close to 2 hours.
Similarly naive outsider, but I've read things here and there. My understanding is that they should have declared mayday (emergency) and landed (potentially at another airport, potentially in the middle of nowhere) _way_ before so that when they have landed they still had 30 minutes or more of fuel in the tanks.
Whether it can be prevented in the future. Should planes fly with even more reserve fuel? It's possible. Or maybe different ways of selecting alternate landing sites?
It may even be the answer is "no, everything went as well as it possibly could have, and adding more reserve fuel to every flight would be unacceptably wasteful, so oh well", but at a minimum they'll probably recommend even more fuel on certain flights into risky weather.
Imagine you're standing on a balcony and discover that the supports are cracked almost all the way through.
Do you shrug and say, that's why they have a safety factor, everything worked as intended? Or do you say, holy crap, I nearly died, how did this happen?
The purpose of the safety factor is to save you if things go badly wrong. The fact that it did its job doesn't mean things didn't go badly wrong. If you don't address what happened then you no longer have a safety factor.
I think a more insightful answer is how often is it acceptable for the reserves to actually be cut into. If this was happening often, then there’s a likelihood of a future disaster. As it is there is 1 isolated case that still ended with a positive outcome. I think it almost adds support for the current reserve levels to be pretty dialed-in.
One of those YouTube channels where a professional pilot evaluates flying incidents had a similar incident when the pilot started yelling at the tower when they tried to make him go around again. He essentially said he would declare an emergency if he didn’t hear different instructions. I think he had 10-15 minutes when he touched down.
One of the things the reserve is for is if the plane immediately in front of you fucks up the runway, you now have to divert to the next airport. You need at least enough fuel to get there and for the tower to shove everyone else out of the way so you can make an emergency landing.
There are other reasons someone could abort a landing and have to go around again, besides debris in the runway. And sometimes two of them can happen consecutively.
In the case I’m referencing, it was pointed out that p the pilot made things worse by going faster than he was told to fly, using up fuel and also making him too close to a previous plane which forced him to go around the previous time, so it wasn’t all the tower.
I have known former air traffic controllers that won't fly certain airlines because of a notorious habit some have for queue jumping by claiming they're low on fuel. If they are low on fuel is something else, but in any case when the ATCs have noticed a pattern then something is up.
This situation sounds a lot less nefarious, but it does also sound like they should have rerouted earlier.
Since there's a lot of confusion in the comments below I'm going to hijack one of the top comments to make a couple points clear from the article and FlightRadar24 data: [1]
They did reroute earlier. It was 2 failed attempts on Prestwick (Glasgow), 45 minutes in the landing pattern, then they diverted to Edinburgh (15 minute flight), a failed attempt at Edinburgh (~5-10 minutes), and then they diverted to Manchester (45 minute flight) and landed successfully there. Likely they hit their reserve just as the Edinburgh landing failed and decided to fly to Manchester, with clearer skies, rather than risk another failure in their reserve.
IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride). Second, if the Edinburgh landing had been successful they would not have eaten into their reserve and no investigation would've been needed. Third, the Monday-morning quarterbacking could've easily gone the other direction if they had diverted to Manchester ("Why did you choose an airport 178 miles away and risk eating into your fuel reserve when Edinburgh was right there?")
Claiming you're low when you are not is going to cause a major headache for the PIC, they're going to have to write that up and they may well be investigated. If it turns out they were lying they would likely find out that that is a career limiting move and if it happens too often then that too should result in consequences. The main reason is that your fake emergency may cause someone else to have a real one.
It is almost fascinating how humans will stoop to dishonesty even in banal situations - and not just any humans, but pilots, who should be subject to at least some vetting.
Maybe planes should be retrofitted as to transmit their actual fuel state including a qualified assessment in minutes to the ATC. Not just because of the cheaters, but also to warn the ATC in the rare case that some plane crew isn't very assertive about their dwindling fuel, or hasn't noticed the problem.
It would make prioritizing the queue a bit more neutral.
If I designed such a system from scratch, "remaining fuel" would be part of my telemetry.
And the reason why those fuel reserves exist is to be a guard band allowing situations like this to happen without flames, wreckage, and death.
Having worked with many US airline pilots over the years, this is also why they are so proud to be unionized. Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers, but the union is also there so that management doesn't get bright ideas about things like cutting fuel reserves to cut costs without the union telling them to stuff it.
Management can't cut fuel reserves, not because the pilots are unionized but because there are some very strict rules about these fuel estimations prior to take off and margins be damned. And those rules are exactly there because otherwise this kind of incident would happen far more frequently. But it's regulation that is the backstop here, not the pilots.
> I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
Just watch Juan Browne, he usually turns out pretty good in analyzing the mishaps. He didn’t upload anything for Manchester yet but will probably soon: https://youtube.com/@blancolirio
I'm also a Blancolirio subscriber. Juan also doesn't try to get ahead of the investigation, really. It's part of what makes him a valuable voice in the space.
I remember this stuff being a bigger story for a short moment x years ago, where low cost carriers (it might have been Ryanair then, too) routinely flew with unreasonably small amounts of "backup" fuel and had to declare emergencies in order to get on the ground safely.
I guess they're trying it again now that the whole thing had blown over.
3 go arounds + 2 hours in a holding pattern should result in at least 45 to 60 minutes left in the tanks after landing. Depending on the kind of aircraft that can be a pretty impressive amount of fuel.
> Does the estimation change depending on weather forecast, season of the year etc?
Yes. There are many factors that go into this including trade winds (which vary quite a bit seasonally and which can make a huge difference), time of day, altitude of the various legs, route flown, weather, distance to alternates, altitude of the place of departure and altitude of the place where you are landing, weight of the aircraft, engine type, engine hours since last overhaul, weight of passengers, luggage and cargo, angle-of-attack and so on. The software I wrote was a couple of thousand lines just to output a single number and 10x as much code for tests, and it was just one module in a much larger pre-flight application.
This honestly makes me think that we're missing a trick if an option for this sort of circumstance can't be "send a military fuel tanker up to refuel them in air" as a last ditch emergency measure (which IMO you would've triggered in this exact scenario).
The argument in favor is simply that we need in air refueling for the military, but justifying all that expenditure is a lot easier if it's dual use technology.
Isn't midair refueling notoriously difficult to get right? The headlines would become "airliner crashes after crew couldn't thread the needle for 45 min"
Yes. Even not forecasted storms in the form of a probability of wind at low altitude when the engines are at their least efficient. And tradewinds at altitude, which are quite variable as well.
Under FAA rules this was a screwup. [edit: see my own reply] (However, the rules are subtle, so they can be partially forgiven.) However, I'm not only a dispatcher but also a philosophy BA, so I've found a good way to explain it.
Your reserve fuel (the "extra" fuel over what the actual flight burn) can of course be used (hello, that's what it's there for) but—and here's the rub—you can never plan on using it.
That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
You may only dip into your reserve when you have no other choice. In this case, when the only fuel they had left was reserve, they are obligated by law to proceed to the alternate airport, which clearly they did not do [correction: they did do the proper thing; see my 2nd reply below]. No bueno.
[this is a slight simplification (minor details omitted for brevity) but the kernel of the issue is properly described]
Update: OK, if *Edinburgh* was their alternate and they missed there and were then forced to bugout for Manchester, that's then an example of when reserve is OK to be burned. (The 'slight simplification' I omitted was unpacking how the alternate fuel plays into the process, but here, that was a key part of the series of events.) That's what I get for not reading TFA first :-/
Not really, you should have enough fuel to make it to multiple alternatives or make emergency landing somewhere else. You should never burn that last 45 mins unless you want to make the news and file a lot of paperwork.
Not necessarily. And I get that you've caveated yourself with an edit and a reply etc, but lets assume that you're not hedging for the moment.
They carried required reserves on departure. Multiple approaches thwarted by extreme unforseen weather. They declared Mayday Fuel, which is mandatory under EASA regulations, when reserve fuel use became unnavoidable. They diverted to the nearest suitable airport.
Landing with 220kg is close, but within bounds of a declared fuel emergency.
Crew decision to declare Mayday and divert was proper airmanship, not negligence.
Yes, reserve fuel may not be planned for. But it may be used. It's there for a reason. Your accusation doesn't account for dynamic evolving weather and realtime decision making.
I'm an instrument rated pilot and an advanced ground instructor under FAA and I fly IMC in bad weather as single pilot IFR around the pacific northwest and colorado.
Was this good/bad? Idk Room for improvement? Maybe? Clearer direction with the benefit of hindsight? Maybe. but the majority of the sentiment in the responses is coming from people not type rated in a 737.
> That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
Is that what happened? That's not in the article, what's the source?
And other comments here are saying the third attempt was in Edinburgh, so they were already trying to land anywhere possible by the third attempt.
At what point are you saying they chose to plan on using reserves when they still had any option for landing without reserves?
Similar philosophies but with differences. e.g. FAA reserve requirements is destination + alternate + 45 mins reserve. EASA is destination + alternate + final reserve which is 30 mins holding for jets and 45 mins for pistons IIRC. But in both cases it's that idea of a destination, an alternatite, and additional. And then there's the requirements around whether you need an alternate, etc.
Looks like they tried two attempts to land in Prestwick over two hours, then flew to Edinburgh and made one aborted landing, then finally went to Manchester.
What a nerve wracking experience for those pilots. I wonder if on the final attempt they knew they had to force it down no matter what.
Per the FlightRadar24 logs, it looks like only about 45min was wasted over Prestwick, not 2hrs. First approach was around 18:06, and they're breaking off to head for Edinburgh by about 18:51.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.
I don't think we know yet when min fuel was declared. At that point, they will be resequenced. Then we need to know when mayday fuel was declared. It sounds pretty odd, like perhaps there were multiple simultaneous situations and the crew did not have adequate information.
About 5 years ago before ATC recordings became mainstay on YouTube, there was an American pilot that declared an emergency at JFK and very firmly said "we are turning back and landing NOW. Get the aircraft OFF all runways".
He was low in fuel and also frustrated with Kennedy ATC because he declared "minimum fuel" earlier and was still getting vectored around. (I know "minimum fuel" is not an emergency and has a very precise meaning).
They must have been very close to running out. But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I’m guessing that pilot had also been taught the lesson of Avianca 052, which crashed at JFK because the FO / captain did not explicitly declare a fuel emergency.
JFK ATC in particular has an enormous workload with many international flights, combined with direct, even conflictual at times, NY communication style. It puts the onus on the pilot for conveying the message to ATC, rather than ATC for extracting the message from the pilot.
> But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I'm not sure it was a lesson learned per-se because the captain was merely doing his job as fundamentally defined.
A captain has ultimate responsibility for the aircraft.
However there is a side question in relation to your post...
When you say "declared an emergency" in your post, the more interesting question would be whether it was actually formally declared by the captain (i.e. "MAYDAY") or whether the captain was merely "working with" ATC at a lower level, maybe "PAN" or maybe just informal "prioritised".
If the captain DID declare "MAYDAY" earlier in the timeframe then yes, Kennedy would have a lot to answer for if they were spending excessive time vectoring around.
But if the captain did not formally declare and then came back later and started bossing Kennedy around, that would be a different set of questions, focused on the captain.
It is a requirement [1] to land with 45 minutes of fuel remaining, if the pilots go under that, it is considered an incident. As soon as estimated landing fuel goes under the limit, the flight needs to declare an emergency (as was done in this case).
They got within a hair of crashing, there is nothing impressive about this. 30 minutes, ok, you still get written up but this is cutting it way too fine.
But I'm truly surprised (in a bad way) people on the ground couldn't solve the situation earlier. The plane was in an emergency situation for hours, wtf.
Also, the airport density in the UK is high, they should have been diverted since before the first attempt, as it has happened to me and thousands of flights every single day around the world.
The incident investigation will surely focus on exactly those things. But: just like shipping aviation is at the mercy of the weather and even though the rules (which are written in plenty of blood) try to anticipate all of the ways in which things go wrong there is a line beyond which you are at risk. I've had one triple go-around in my life and it soured me on flying for a long time afterwards because I have written software to compute the amount of fuel required for a flight and I know how thin the margins are once you fail that third time. I am not going to get ahead of the investigation and speculate but I can think of at least five ways in which this could have happened, and I'm mostly curious about whether the root cause is one of those five or something completely different. Note that until there is weight on the wheels you don't actually know how much fuel remains in the tanks, there always is some uncertainty, to the pilots it may well have looked as if the tanks were already empty while they were still flying the plane. Those people must have been extremely stressed out on that final attempt to land.
> One pilot who reviewed the log said: “Just imagine that whenever you land with less than 2T (2,000kg) of fuel left you start paying close attention to the situation. Less than 1.5T you are sweating. But (220kg) is as close to a fatal accident as possible.”
> The Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks when it finally landed, according to a picture of what appears to be a handwritten technical log. Pilots who examined the picture said this would be enough for just five or six minutes of flying.
For reference, passenger airlines immediately declare emergency if their planned flight path would put them under 30 minutes of fuel (at least in the US). Landing with 5 minutes remaining of fuel is very atypical
Incident: Malta Air B738 at Prestwick, Edinburgh and Manchester on Oct 3rd 2025, landed below minimum fuel
By Simon Hradecky, created Sunday, Oct 5th 2025 14:39Z, last updated Friday, Oct 10th 2025 15:02Z
A Malta Air Boeing 737-800 on behalf of Ryanair, registration 9H-QBD performing flight FR-3418 from Pisa (Italy) to Prestwick,SC (UK), was on final approach to Prestwick's runway 20 when the crew went around due to weather. The aircraft entered a hold, then attempted a second approach to runway 20 about 30 minutes after the go around, but again needed to go around. The aircraft again entered a hold, about 10 minutes after entering the hold the crew decided to divert to Edinburgh,SC (UK) where the aircraft joined the final approach to runway 24 about one hour after the first go around but again went around. The aircraft subsequently diverted to Manchester,EN (UK) where the aircraft landed on runway 23R about 110 minutes after the first go around.
On Oct 5th 2025 The Aviation Herald received information that the aircraft landed below minimum fuel with just 220kg fuel (total, 100kg in left and 120 kg in right tank) remaining.
The aircraft returned to service about 13 hours after landing.
On Oct 10th 2025 the AAIB reported the occurrence was rated a serious incident and is being investigated.
A passenger reported after the first go around at Prestwick the crew announced, they would do another attempt to land at Prestwick, then divert to Manchester. Following the second go around the crew however announced they were now diverting to Edinburgh, only after the failed approach to Edinburgh the crew diverted to Manchester.
In commercial aviation (passenger/cargo), typically about half the take-off weight is fuel. That's not half the payload weight (pax + cargo + fuel), it's half the takeoff weight.
For a medium-range flight (say ~2000 mi / 3200 km) each passenger incurs somewhat more than their own weight in fuel.
I don't think that's correct. The MTOW (Maximum Take-Off Weight) of an A320ceo is 78,000 kg, while the max fuel capacity is approximately 24,210 litres. Using Jet A-1's density of roughly 0.804 kg/L, that's about 19,460 kg of fuel, which represents only 25% of the take-off weight. The OEW (Operating Empty Weight) for that aircraft is approximately 42,600 kg, which means you'd need the fuel to weigh around 35,400 kg for your "half the take-off weight is fuel" claim to be true—nearly double the actual fuel capacity.
Even for a long-range aircraft like the A350-900, with an MTOW of 280,000 kg and a fuel capacity of approximately 138,000 litres (roughly 111,000 kg at 0.804 kg/L), fuel represents about 40% of the take-off weight. The OEW is approximately 155,000 kg, meaning even a completely empty plane (except for crew) loaded with maximum fuel still wouldn't reach your claimed 50% fuel fraction.
Because the market responds to your behavior by slightly lowering the cost of flying to fill those seats, demand increases to match from slightly lower income people. Because they then organize their lives slightly more around cheap flights, it gets even harder to lower the impact of flying.
Paradoxically, rich people like us (you're a tech worker too...) flying more, because we're less sensitive to price, leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes. If you have more seats from the lower end of the market... you don't have as much flexibility in solutions.
Especially crazy considering the 737 is not a particularly large commercial aircraft.
40kg/minute is around 12 gallons (47 liters) of fuel per minute. Meanwhile a 777 burns around 42 gallons (160 liters) per minute. A 747 burns 63 gallons (240 liters) per minute - more than a gallon per second!
40kg of fuel per minute is a lot but airplanes carry a lot of people.
Web searches suggest a 737-800 gets about 0.5mpg at cruise. With 189 passengers in a one-class layout that’s 95mpg per passenger. With 162 in a two-class layout that’s 81mpg per passenger.
This is better than a single person in a car but four people in a Prius gets 50mpg * 4 = 200 mpg.
This is what vexes me about the lack of emphasis on highway self-driving. Everyone's obsessed with robo taxis.
An overnight trip that's automated could go at 40 mph and get seriously good gas mileage. I mean man with four people would probably get almost 100 miles per gallon.
And this would eliminate a lot of short-range flights
It should be a lot easier to implement than having to worry about a whole class of problems that robo taxis in cities have
Look at it (2.5 t/h) by volume (0.82 kg/L): 3 kL/h (790 gal/h) == 50 L/m (13 gal/m) == 830 mL/s (0.9 qt/s), and then divide the total flow rate by 2 for rate per engine.
Or divide the total by the number of passengers (~189) flying to consider effective fuel economy (per passenger) or 13 kg/pax/h or 3.6 g/pax/s.
They must plan to never land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, or about 1.25 t, and I'd say they should never, ever land with less than 15 minutes in their career during a pan/mayday bingo fuel emergency.
It reminds me of a Transavia flight from Girona to Rotterdam that had to be diverted to Amsterdam back in 2015 (1 attempt at Rotterdam, decided to divert to Amsterdam, then 2 attempts in Amsterdam).
It was a particularly stormy weekend and it turns out from the article that they had 992kg of fuel left:
The latest Captains Speaking podcast has an discussion about one of the hosts being in a similar situation: https://youtu.be/5ovlZ221tDQ
Fortunately, the flight left with extra fuel, because it was cheaper to carry excess from the origin airport than to buy it at the destination airport, so reserve fuel wasn't needed, but it was close. Also, there was lots of lightning.
I absolutely love insights like this into areas of the world I have no knowledge. Makes absolute sense in the modern world but also something I'd not think about
Trucking companies started adding this to their logistics about a decade ago as well. Once they had accurate fuel price information for most of the country they started telling their drivers precisely how much fuel to onboard at each stop.
As a naive person, I have a simple question - why would they even fly to an airport where there's 100mph winds? Wouldn't ATC know this and tell the flight way in advance to fly to a different destination?
Because the weather is very changeable. You may get a lull in the wind for a couple of mins, enough to land.
I've been on a couple of flights like that. Once where we did two attempts and landed on the 2nd, the other where we did 3 but the had to divert. Other planes were just managing to land in the winds before and after our attempts.
The other problem is (as I found out on that flight) that mass diversions are not good. The airport I diverted to in the UK had dozens of unexpected arrivals, late at night. There wasn't the ground staff to manage this so it took forever to get people off. It then was too full to accept any more landings, so further flights had to get diverted further and further away.
So, if you did a blanket must divert you'd end up with all the diversion airports full (even to flights that could have landed at their original airport) and a much more dangerous situation as your diversions are now in different countries.
I wonder if the pilots considered Newcastle (or Teeside)? The METARs showed favourable weather conditions at Newcastle and many planes landed there that day without issue I believe. Also far closer to Edinburgh than Manchester. I wonder if they thought that Manchester being further south, had a better chance of better weather?
This very recent Mentour documentary is extremely relevant, came to mind immediately. Multiple redirects due to bad weather, extreme "Get-there-itis" and eventually running out of fuel.
Great edutainment if you're feeling in the mood for that. If you're inpatient you can skip to 14 minutes, before that it's just backstory.
Most of the trains north between Preston and Glasgow were being cancelled that day due to the weather. Perhaps knowing they only had one more attempt at landing safely left, Manchester further south seemed like the better bet.
You'll probably have to wait a while. Petter is pretty insistent on waiting for the full incident report so that he can be completely thorough and avoid speculating.
The headline is about the landing, but the issue here happened at takeoff. There were 100 mph winds at the destination and this was their 4th fallback attempt and their third airport. This flight should never have taken off, the risk of multiple diversions was easily predictable, but the flight took off headed toward an airport in dangerous conditions, got diverted to a second airport that was just as dangerous, then finally to a third where conditions were so bad other flights were being cancelled (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/storm-amy-brings-flight-chaos-2019...) and where it finally landed because it was either land at that airport or land somewhere that is not at all an airport. Once this flight was in the air, disaster was more or less inevitable and we lucked into a narrow eviting window.
This seems to be a case where the error was that the 2nd diversion was to another commercial/passenger airport. The situation after it was determined Edinburgh was a no-go was dire and making it to an airport like Manchester was a luxury they did not have safe fuel for.
> The pilots had been taking passengers from Pisa in Italy to Prestwick in Scotland on Friday evening, but wind speeds of up to 100mph meant they were unable to land.
> After three failed attempts to touch down, the pilots of Ryanair flight FR3418 issued a mayday emergency call and raced to Manchester, where the weather was calmer.
#1 - if Prestwick had wind speeds up to 100mph, then why the h*ll was the airport not closed down?
#2 - if the pilots had experienced conditions that dire during their first two landing attempts at Prestwick, then why the h*ll did they stick around for a third attempt?
EDIT: The article's a big vague, but it seems to have been 2 attempts at Prestwick, then 1 at Edinburgh, then the last-minute "oops, do I really want to die today?" decision to run to Manchester.
This one is pretty straightforward so it doesn't need an AAIB report. Failure of pilots to brief destination weather conditions and anticipate proper bingo fuel accordingly. Storms in the area == brief max go arounds, brief alternates, and carry extra fuel. They screwed up by taking unnecessary risks of too many go arounds and barely making an alternate because they didn't play it safe by carrying additional fuel. Take these bold pilots to the chief pilot's office for an uncomfortable conversation without tasty snacks.
United Airlines Flight 173 ran out of fuel while circling Portland International Airport trying to troubleshoot a landing gear. Six more minutes of fuel could have helped the airliner to land in the Columbia river by the airport or belly land on the runway. The captain chose to keep troubleshooting and crashed just 6 miles away from the airport.
Are there any good online databases with fuel level details for individual commercial flights? I've been on a few flights that had to circle for a long time / had a number of go-round attempts, and I've never been able to find details after the fact about how close to the margins we were.
We definitely involve the dispatcher in the diversion decision. Especially if it's an unplanned diversion, where the big-picture view the dispatcher has is very useful for us in our metal tube.
Sure, company dispatchers are usually part of the conversation, and in non-emergency diversions (i.e. the vast majority), they may suggest specific airports that would be more convenient for company logistics. But the final decision is always the pilots' - and once they've declared an emergency, more or less every single airfield, including military, becomes available to them.
Unless they are in an emergency and are busy with aviating, they will coordinate with their dispatcher on diverting, even if only to verify that the weather at the intended alternate is still favorable. Per the FAA regulations, the PIC and the dispatcher have joint operational control over the flight. Of course, at the end of the day, only the pilots have their hands on the controls, so they can make the plane do what they want—but from a legal standpoint, the dispatcher and pilot-in-command have equal & shared responsibility for the safe operation of the flight.
I realize this is a UK carrier and was operating in the EU/UK, but for the most part, the rest of the world uses the US legal framework for aviation as a boilerplate for their own civil code. Yes, there are some differences, but these are usually minor and more of "differences in quantity" rather than "differences in kind". [Since the airplane was invented here the US had a head start on regulating civil aviation.]
This happened in my country with I think a Vistara flight, where they had 5 minutes of fuel left.
I myself went from Bangalore to Delhi a couple of weeks back, and the poor pilots told the air hostesses at least twice or thrice to prepare for landing but the plane did not land until much much later.
Had a 1 maybe 1.5h holding pattern in Oslo once in Ryanair where they hoped they could land in extreme snow. Then diverted in the end (surprise!). Happened in 2009 though. Joked they were very desperate to land at Oslo because they cant afford to divert.
And that is how fuel reservoir requirements rise for all. Im sure, the whole airline industry is looking at the whole markets share prices going down- writing happy songs and packing gift baskets for Ryanair.
On the positive side, if they had made a crash landing with so little fuel, there would not likely have been a fiery explosion, and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
Air + fuel explodes just fine. You really don't want to crash an airliner. At landing speed the number of people dead will still be > 0 and the remainder has a good chance of being injured seriously.
This happened at landing speed (the airport is only a few hundred meters from the crash site) and the plane was at the end of its flight from Turkey, it did not catch fire. Still, 9 people perished and the remainder were all but one injured 11 of them seriously.
> and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
This[1] kind of crash landing is very rare (in that case there was no fire despite being immediately after take off, perhaps because of the cold). Normally an outcome like this is only reasonable to expect if you actually reach a runway despite being out of fuel. Like Gimli[2].
Yup. They also popularised excessive baggage under the seat, and I routinely used to see obvious hazards that would impede an evacuation. Staff would turn a blind eye. Probably still do
Further, with the baggage being there in easy reach under the seat, I reckon people would be more tempted to take it with them when evacuating.
That they're are a safe airline seems to be incredible luck - they have all the components for it not to be.
Yes and no. I had this happen recently and looked into it.
My wife has been using my car, which is a Diesel Golf with a fuel capacity of 14.5 gallons. We set off driving one Saturday to visit my parents, and I noticed the fuel gauge was below empty already. By the time I got to the gas station, I put 14.3 gallons of fuel into it. I calculated that that works out to be about a cup and a half of fuel.
So once you hit empty on my car, you definitely have a ways you can drive still. I feel comfortable driving about 30+ miles, and it's never died on me. That puts it at no more than 1 gallon of fuel left in the car based on my experience (not scientific I know, but I've owned 2 of these cars, with about 190k total driven miles). It's a lot less than 10 liters from E to Dead on the roadside.
You shouldn't tempt fate with a diesel, or any direction injection car for that matter. The high pressure pump will shred itself very quickly as the diesel is used for lubrication.
* enough reserve to waste some in traffic. On top of that
* enough reserve to find gas station. On top of that
* enough reserve to drive to neighbouring city for gas station. On top of that
* enough to cruise 30 minutes around that neighbouring city looking for other gas station in case the previous ones were closed. On top of that
* enough station to run around parking lot looking for space to park
One of the problems with modern internet discourse is there is an implicit assumption that the problem of one country is automatically the problem of another country.
I've never heard of any of these problems with RyanAir. They treat you as less than cattle and generally their service is shit, but I'm not aware of RyanAir being unsafe.
Actually, in a quick check it seems the total fatality count for RyanAir is zero, with only two (on-fatal) major incidents (2008, 2021). That's seems a pretty good track record considering the amount of flights they do.
> Between overworked, understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots, I'm expecting some major disasters in the coming years.
Maybe in the US, but this story is based in Europe, each country maintains a regulated standard and there are no EU wide disruptions that have ever happened to the best of my knowledge. Also Ryanair don't travel transatlantic flights.
Three weeks ago in Nice, France it was a fraction of a second away from two A320s crashing [0] and possibly hundreds of deaths, similar to Tenerife disaster [1].
Investigation is ongoing and many factors are at play (bad weather, extra work for ATC due to that, confusing lighting of runways etc) but also, from French media reports, there used to be 15 people per shift 5y ago in Nice ATC, now there are just 12, and traffic is higher.
Many people left the profession during Covid and haven't been replaced.
I mean, the US also hasn't had any widespread waves of disruptions that led to incidents or flight problems. Same as the EU. American flights and airspace are usually safer too, statistically speaking.
Why? Is ATC a problem in other countries than the US? Are they also under training pilots? If anything RyanAir with its flamboyant history of cost cutting (CEO always threatening to charge for use of the onboard lavatory) seems a more likely source than the flying infrastructure itself.
Ryanair has a very good safety history, among the highest in the world.
They make outrageous claims for publicity, and their customer experience is all about hidden extras and "gotcha" pricing, but I don't think they fuck around when it comes to safety.
They know that with their reputation they would be sunk if they did have a major incident.
What indication is there that our pilots are undertrained?
I am just a PPL, and that was not an easy thing to accomplish (most pilots complete 50% more hours than required before they are able to pass that test), but my impression is that western training standards for commercial pilots are incredibly high, and the safety record seems to back that up.
Waiting on full flight in Europe, good airport, for take off.
Pilot says over speaker : " We are delayed becuase FUEL guy got UPSET on tarmac and has QUIT. We know need someone ELSE to fill the plane with FUEL. " Said in a COMPLETELY nonchalant voice.
Immediately I get concerned, try not to think what cause a FUEL TECH to QUIT regarding THIS PLANE and fuel issue. Just close my eyes, relax.
2 minutes later pilot comes on intercom again "For some WEIRD reason, someone wants to get off the plane. Now we have to wait for ground crew to find his suitcasebecause of rules. How annoying.."
Plane waits for an hour on tarmac for BOTH passenger to get off and for FUEL to be finally "resolved".
Arrive eventually at destination.
Most of the trouble would have been avoided if the pilot had not sounded nonchalant about a "NON ISSUE about FUEL that a technician just QUIT OVER". I swear i even rememebr saying the statement with a hint of humour, like what on earth is the problem.
This is a true story, and the fact this incompetence happened to me, well I wouldnt have believed it otherwise.
I imagine everyone involved know that they are doing dangerous things, not taking a drop more fuel than is legally required for profit, knowing that none of that is going to change unless there is a major accident... They keep[1] landing these planes with X minutes of fuel left, but it doesn't do anything, until some plane falls from the sky with 0 minutes of fuel left then everyone knew all along and the rules are changed and nobody is held accountable.
You missed the point of the story, the issue was not lack of fuel, it was a crew member quitting because of a fuel issue, most likely a misunderstanding.
Fuel misunderstandings have resulted in numerous serious incidents, try googling it bro
That is very exceptional. I've written fuel estimation software for airliners (cargo, fortunately), and the number of rules regarding go-arounds, alternates and holding time resulted in there usually being quite a bit of fuel in the tanks on landing, by design. I've never heard of '6 minutes left' in practice where it wasn't a massive issue and the investigation into how this could have happened will make for interesting reading. A couple of notes: the wind and the time spent on the three go-arounds + what was necessary to get to the alternate may not be the whole story here, that's actually factored in before you even take off.
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
The context you're missing is that Ryanair have routinely declared fuel emergencies in the past, and it seems an operational tactic - they want to carry less fuel to burn less fuel, and then have to regularly mayday to jump the stack on inbound, saving cash. That's not covered in the article, but you can sure as hell expect the CAA are going to take another look at them and their operations planning.
On this one, they did 3 attempted landings at Prestwick. [Edit: I now see that the third attempt was at EDI] What happened between the first and the second landing that made them think on their second go-around that a third attempt was more likely to succeed than the previous two? Was the wind dying down, or was the captain just feeling a bit braver or stupider? [Edit: I'm still curious as to what information they gathered that landing conditions were significantly different at EDI to make that diversion, given its relatively close and so likely to have similar weather].
Why was their final reserve Manchester when there were literally dozens of closer suitable airports, at least some of which are likely to have had better wind conditions by virtue of lower gusts, or more aligned to runway direction so not dealing with a strong crosswind?
There are many reasons I won't fly Ryanair, but not least because they have been shown over and over again to make reckless planning and operational decisions, and they are fortunate to have not had hull losses as a result. Time is ticking down, variance will catch them one day, and a sad & tragic catastrophe is only a matter of time. People will go to prison as a result, because this pattern of behaviour shows that this isn't "bad luck", it's calculated risk taking with passenger and crew lives to save money.
> There are many reasons I won't fly Ryanair
I swore off them a decade ago when I realised how adversarial their relationship with their passengers is.
Until an accident does happen, I have no doubt they'll trouser a lot of cash.
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I once had a board member who was also on the board of Ryan Air, and he casually told me a story about when their CEO gave a presentation on adding a credit card -powered interlock on the cabin lavatories. He told them, “They’re my planes and if you have the nerve to shit in them you should have to pay for the cleanup”.
My colleague thought he was portraying the CEO as a cool guy and decisive manager, but I thought the guy sounds like a sociopath.
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Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
On a nominally 2h45m flight, they spent an extra 2 hours in the air, presumably doing doing fuel intensive altitude changing maneuvers, and were eventually able to land safely with their reserves almost exhausted.
I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
How much fuel should they have landed with?
In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states. The equation is
hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident
Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.)
One such hazardous state we have defined in aviation is "less than N minutes of fuel remaining when landing". If an aircraft lands with less than N minutes of fuel on board, it would only have taken bad environmental conditions to make it crash, rather than land. Thus we design commercial aviation so that planes always have N minutes of fuel remaining when landing. If they don't, that's a big deal: they've entered a hazardous state, and we never want to see that. (I don't remember if N is 30 or 45 or 60 but somewhere in that region.)
For another example, one of my children loves playing around cliffs and rocks. Initially he was very keen on promising me that he wouldn't fall down. I explained the difference between accidents and hazardous states to him in childrens' terms, and he realised slowly that he cannot control whether or not he has an accident, so it's a bad idea to promise me that he won't have an accident. What he can control is whether or not bad environmental conditions lead to an accident, and he does that by keeping out of hazardous states. In this case, the hazardous state would be standing less than a child-height within a ledge when there is nobody below ready to catch. He can promise me to avoid that, and that satisfies me a lot more than a promise to not fall.
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As others have said, final fuel reserves are typically at least half an hour, and you shouldn't really be cutting into them. What if their first approach into MAN had led to another go around?
With a major storm heading north-easterly across the UK, the planning should have reasonably foreseen that an airport 56 miles east may also be unavailable, and should've further diverted prior to that point.
They likely used the majority of their final fuel reserve on the secondary diversion from EDI to MAN, presumably having planned to land at their alternate (EDI) around the time they reached the final fuel reserve.
Any CAA report into this, if there is one produced, is going to be interesting, because there's multiple people having made multiple decisions that led to this.
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I'm not an aviation expert, but generally in safety engineering, safety buffers are not simply calculated as [normal situation] * [safety factor], but [worst case scenario] * [safety factor]
If you ever cut into your safety allowance, you've already fucked up. Your expected design criteria should account for all use cases, nominal or worst-case. The safety factor is there for safety, it is never intended to be used.
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"I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all."
You're confused why they should investigate how everyone on that flight came within minutes of dying?
Something about the fuel reserves, procedures, or execution was clearly flawed.
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Depends if our goal is to have zero aircraft crashes. If the goal is zero, then for any given parameter, you have to define a margin of safety well before crash territory and treat breaching that margin as seriously as if there had been a crash.
Similarly planes are kept 5 nautical miles apart horizontally, and if they get closer than that, you guessed it - investigation. Ofc planes could come within inches and everyone could live, but if we normalize flying within inches, the we are also normalizing zero safety margin, turning small minor inevitable human failings into catastrophe death & destruction. As an example, planes communicate with ATC over the radio and are given explicit instructions - turn left 20 degrees, fly heading 140 etc. From time to time these instructions are misunderstood and have to be corrected. At 5nm separation everyone involved has plenty of time to notice that something was missed/garbled/misinterpreted etc and correct. At 1 inch separation, there's no such time. Any mistake is fatal, even though in theory you are safe when separated by 1 inch.
TBC an investigation doesn't mean investigating the pilots in order to assign blame, it means investigating the entire aviation system that led up to the breach. The pilot's actions / inaction will certainly be part of that, but the goal is to ask, "How could this have been avoided, and ask how every part of the system that we have some control or influence over might have contributed to the outcome"
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Well imagine they had to do a go-around on that landing. Go-arounds are extremely normal and might be done for a million reasons; your speed is wrong, your descent rate is wrong, your positioning is wrong, there's bad wind, there's an issue on the ground, etc etc etc. Six minutes of fuel is really not enough to be sure that you can do a go-around. So now, if ANY of those very normal everyday issues occurs, the pilot has to choose between two very bad options: doing a go-around with almost no fuel, or attempting a landing despite the issue. That's just way too close for comfort.
Aviation operates on a Swiss cheese model; the idea is that you want many many layers of safety (slices of cheese). Inevitably, every layer will have some holes, but with enough layers, you should still be safe; there won't be a hole that goes all the way through. In this case, they basically got down to their very last slice of cheese; it was just luck that the last layer held.
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>I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
One of the most important aspects of taking safety seriously is that you do not just investigate things which had an impact, but that you proactively investigate near misses (as was the case here) and even potential incidents.
A plane with 6 minutes of fuel left is always a risk to every person on board and potentially others if an emergency landing becomes the only option.
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If you cut into the final reserve, it’s a full-blown emergency requiring a mayday call.
This should not happen. So what’s there to investigate? How it was allowed to happen, and how to prevent it from happening again.
EDIT: it’s a mayday even earlier than that. It’s a mayday once the pilots know that they WILL land with less than the final reserve.
If they have to touch and go, how long would it take until they get the plane around for another approach? In fact, you might not get as far as that touch and go and have to go around. You need some margin for all of these eventualities. The likelihood is low that these happen, but they have to be accounted for.
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This reminds of discussions following the Fukushima disaster where one commenter claimed that it wasn't a design flaw, because it was an extraordinary circumstance. I found this appalling, because I do not at all think that was the risk profile that was sold to the public; I think people believed that it was supposed to be designed to safely survive 1000-year earthquakes and the tsunamis that they create.
Likewise, I think that the flying public is lead to believe fuel exhaustion is so rare that when airlines are compliant with regulations, no such disasters across all flights across all carriers will occur during your lifetime.
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6 min, is empty, 6 min is purely theoretical, 6 min would not clear for ground handling or a test start, or a fuel system check,6 min would not do a go around. will interesting to see if they release info about what the real amount of fuel left is, and an authorative discussion on how much useable flight time was there. did they actualy make the taxi to the terminal?, or run out on the apron?
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Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
I don't remember all of the rules off the top of my head, but if you are ever landing with less than 30 minutes of fuel, something has gone seriously wrong. You are required to take off with sufficient fuel to fly to your destination, hold for a period of time, attempt a landing, fly to your alternate, and land all with 30 minutes remaining. If you are ever in a situation where you may not meet these conditions, you are required to divert immediately. In choosing your alternate, you consider weather conditions along with many other factors. This was, without question, a serious emergency.
From the very brief description in the article, I would say they should have diverted to Manchester at least 25 minutes sooner than they did. I will include the GP's caution, however:
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
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My understanding is that they shouldn't have spent that much time in the air (not intended as a guess for the cause). The margin is there for situations where you can't land earlier, not the margin for scheduling the landing. There is margin for expected potential delays, they were in the other margin that should never be used except in true emergencies.
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>One pilot who reviewed the log said: “Just imagine that whenever you land with less than 2T (2,000kg) of fuel left you start paying close attention to the situation. Less than 1.5T you are sweating. But this is as close to a fatal accident as possible.”
Thirty minutes.
If at any point you expect to touch down at the nearest safe airport with less than 30 minutes of fuel remaining, you are required by regulation to make a mayday call.
Mayday is a term enshrined in law. It is only to be used when people will die if you do not receive help. In the US, calling it inappropriately can be punished with up to 10 years in jail and a $250k fine. It's protected in this way because as soon as you call mayday, in many situations there are actions that must be taken by law or regulation. Other appropriate uses include things like "our plane is on fire" or "our wing just fell off and we can't steer the plane".
As soon as you think you can't land with the fuel reserves you are _required_ to call mayday, other pilots are _required_ to clear the radio for you, and ATC is _required_ to provide any and all supported possible until you're on the ground.
The investigation is not to figure out who to send to jail or something. The investigation is because a flight just came this >< close to having hundreds of people die. That fuel is there as a safety margin, yes. That's how everyone ended up walking off this plane instead of dying as the plane was ripped apart by some trees somewhere. That is good.
But air travel did not become as safe as it with an attitude of "this hasn't killed anyone yet, all good". The fact there was an incursion into the safety margin should not be looked at as "eh, working as intended" but "holy hell we just came this close to disaster, what went wrong that almost killed all these people? how do we stop that happening again?". That is what an investigation will be looking to figure out.
To put it in vaguely IT terms, this is something like... your application has started corrupting its database, but you have _a_ backup copy. On one hand, you can think "eh, we have a backup, that's what it's there for, who cares". On the other you can go "holy shit, any time we need to restore from the backup we narrowly averted disaster... how do we make sure we're not in that situation again?". The former is probably going to lead to irrecoverable data loss eventually. The second will have you addressing problems _before_ they ruin you.
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Only issue I see is that should there have been stricter rules to diverting way earlier. If winds were such as to make landing harder. Would just directly going somewhere else been the correct choice to force.
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If you get shot, but had a bullet proof vest on, and hence didn’t die, technically everything worked as intended.
Personally, I’d still want to figure out why I got shot and work on making sure that didn’t happen again.
Especially if you basically got shot multiple times (for an analogy in this case).
> I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
So because the safety margin still worked while down to near vapors we should conclude there's nothing to learn for the future to reduce the risk of similar incidents?
That's certainly... a take.
Flight from Edinburgh to Manchester is just a bit more than 1 hour, so after trying 2 landings, diverting to Edinburgh (15-20 minutes flight), 1 more landing attempt, well, you get very close to 2 hours.
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Similarly naive outsider, but I've read things here and there. My understanding is that they should have declared mayday (emergency) and landed (potentially at another airport, potentially in the middle of nowhere) _way_ before so that when they have landed they still had 30 minutes or more of fuel in the tanks.
Whether it can be prevented in the future. Should planes fly with even more reserve fuel? It's possible. Or maybe different ways of selecting alternate landing sites?
It may even be the answer is "no, everything went as well as it possibly could have, and adding more reserve fuel to every flight would be unacceptably wasteful, so oh well", but at a minimum they'll probably recommend even more fuel on certain flights into risky weather.
Imagine you're standing on a balcony and discover that the supports are cracked almost all the way through.
Do you shrug and say, that's why they have a safety factor, everything worked as intended? Or do you say, holy crap, I nearly died, how did this happen?
The purpose of the safety factor is to save you if things go badly wrong. The fact that it did its job doesn't mean things didn't go badly wrong. If you don't address what happened then you no longer have a safety factor.
I think a more insightful answer is how often is it acceptable for the reserves to actually be cut into. If this was happening often, then there’s a likelihood of a future disaster. As it is there is 1 isolated case that still ended with a positive outcome. I think it almost adds support for the current reserve levels to be pretty dialed-in.
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> How much fuel should they have landed with?
I think about 30 minutes worth of fuel.
Not knowing their flight plan, it could have been that Edinburgh was the first alternate and Manchester the second alternate.
Might not be about fuel but about why they even tried instead of diverting earlier.
Might even be 100% done by the book but book needs changing (tho I doubt that, it's not exactly first case of "a lot of bad weather")
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I dont know but maybe they should have diverted sooner. Maybe an hour into the flight?
30min+
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ideally, enough to divert to another airport, in the off chance something happens, like a pending emergency at point post.
At what point should they investigate?
0 minutes?
-1 minutes?
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One of those YouTube channels where a professional pilot evaluates flying incidents had a similar incident when the pilot started yelling at the tower when they tried to make him go around again. He essentially said he would declare an emergency if he didn’t hear different instructions. I think he had 10-15 minutes when he touched down.
One of the things the reserve is for is if the plane immediately in front of you fucks up the runway, you now have to divert to the next airport. You need at least enough fuel to get there and for the tower to shove everyone else out of the way so you can make an emergency landing.
There are other reasons someone could abort a landing and have to go around again, besides debris in the runway. And sometimes two of them can happen consecutively.
In the case I’m referencing, it was pointed out that p the pilot made things worse by going faster than he was told to fly, using up fuel and also making him too close to a previous plane which forced him to go around the previous time, so it wasn’t all the tower.
Really? Equally as an outsider - it feels like one "go-around" and you're fucked.
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I have known former air traffic controllers that won't fly certain airlines because of a notorious habit some have for queue jumping by claiming they're low on fuel. If they are low on fuel is something else, but in any case when the ATCs have noticed a pattern then something is up.
This situation sounds a lot less nefarious, but it does also sound like they should have rerouted earlier.
Since there's a lot of confusion in the comments below I'm going to hijack one of the top comments to make a couple points clear from the article and FlightRadar24 data: [1]
They did reroute earlier. It was 2 failed attempts on Prestwick (Glasgow), 45 minutes in the landing pattern, then they diverted to Edinburgh (15 minute flight), a failed attempt at Edinburgh (~5-10 minutes), and then they diverted to Manchester (45 minute flight) and landed successfully there. Likely they hit their reserve just as the Edinburgh landing failed and decided to fly to Manchester, with clearer skies, rather than risk another failure in their reserve.
IMHO the only questionable pilot decision here is to divert to Edinburgh rather than Manchester immediately. But this is somewhat understandable: first of all, dropping the passengers off at Edinburgh (an hour drive from Glasgow) is significantly less costly and less inconvenient than dropping them at Manchester (an overnight bus ride). Second, if the Edinburgh landing had been successful they would not have eaten into their reserve and no investigation would've been needed. Third, the Monday-morning quarterbacking could've easily gone the other direction if they had diverted to Manchester ("Why did you choose an airport 178 miles away and risk eating into your fuel reserve when Edinburgh was right there?")
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4
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Claiming you're low when you are not is going to cause a major headache for the PIC, they're going to have to write that up and they may well be investigated. If it turns out they were lying they would likely find out that that is a career limiting move and if it happens too often then that too should result in consequences. The main reason is that your fake emergency may cause someone else to have a real one.
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Which airlines? I feel like if this is an issue we should be naming names.
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Kinda surprised there's no data link for that sort of telemetry so that you don't necessarily have to take the pilot's word for it.
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"claiming they're low on fuel"
It is almost fascinating how humans will stoop to dishonesty even in banal situations - and not just any humans, but pilots, who should be subject to at least some vetting.
Maybe planes should be retrofitted as to transmit their actual fuel state including a qualified assessment in minutes to the ATC. Not just because of the cheaters, but also to warn the ATC in the rare case that some plane crew isn't very assertive about their dwindling fuel, or hasn't noticed the problem.
It would make prioritizing the queue a bit more neutral.
If I designed such a system from scratch, "remaining fuel" would be part of my telemetry.
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And the reason why those fuel reserves exist is to be a guard band allowing situations like this to happen without flames, wreckage, and death.
Having worked with many US airline pilots over the years, this is also why they are so proud to be unionized. Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers, but the union is also there so that management doesn't get bright ideas about things like cutting fuel reserves to cut costs without the union telling them to stuff it.
Management can't cut fuel reserves, not because the pilots are unionized but because there are some very strict rules about these fuel estimations prior to take off and margins be damned. And those rules are exactly there because otherwise this kind of incident would happen far more frequently. But it's regulation that is the backstop here, not the pilots.
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> Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers
That's a funny way to phrase it. I'd probably go the other way and say "sure, FAANG developers make as much as some pilots..."
Those pilots have hundreds of lives on the line every day.
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> I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
Just watch Juan Browne, he usually turns out pretty good in analyzing the mishaps. He didn’t upload anything for Manchester yet but will probably soon: https://youtube.com/@blancolirio
I'm also a Blancolirio subscriber. Juan also doesn't try to get ahead of the investigation, really. It's part of what makes him a valuable voice in the space.
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I remember this stuff being a bigger story for a short moment x years ago, where low cost carriers (it might have been Ryanair then, too) routinely flew with unreasonably small amounts of "backup" fuel and had to declare emergencies in order to get on the ground safely.
I guess they're trying it again now that the whole thing had blown over.
Pretty obviously not the case here if you read the article.
Yeah, again, I’m going to wait for the Mentour Pilot analysis on this one.
> it shouldn't have happened, no matter what
You hear that a lot, with Ryanair stories.
Sounds like a great airline!
Ryanair has an impeccable safety record.
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"make speculative statements"
isn't this 99 percent of modern infotainment "journalism" though? making speculative statements, omitting and lying..
How many go-arounds and alternates are usually accounted for? Assuming EU, high-airport density etc, typical 2h flight.
Does the estimation change depending on weather forecast, season of the year etc?
3 go arounds + 2 hours in a holding pattern should result in at least 45 to 60 minutes left in the tanks after landing. Depending on the kind of aircraft that can be a pretty impressive amount of fuel.
> Does the estimation change depending on weather forecast, season of the year etc?
Yes. There are many factors that go into this including trade winds (which vary quite a bit seasonally and which can make a huge difference), time of day, altitude of the various legs, route flown, weather, distance to alternates, altitude of the place of departure and altitude of the place where you are landing, weight of the aircraft, engine type, engine hours since last overhaul, weight of passengers, luggage and cargo, angle-of-attack and so on. The software I wrote was a couple of thousand lines just to output a single number and 10x as much code for tests, and it was just one module in a much larger pre-flight application.
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Yeah, to give some idea, I believe the technical term that would have been radioed from the pilot in this situation would have been "mayday fuel."
I'm just curious, is this hard on the fuel pumps? I've always been told to not run gas down in your car because the pumps will get hot.
The pumps are fuel cooled, but it's designed such that the pumps remain in the fuel even in a low fuel situation.
>I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened
>Ryanair
I wouldn't be so wary.
Very insightful, thanks. Glad everything was ok.
All I had to contribute was to ask if they were trying to hypermile or something?
This honestly makes me think that we're missing a trick if an option for this sort of circumstance can't be "send a military fuel tanker up to refuel them in air" as a last ditch emergency measure (which IMO you would've triggered in this exact scenario).
The argument in favor is simply that we need in air refueling for the military, but justifying all that expenditure is a lot easier if it's dual use technology.
Isn't midair refueling notoriously difficult to get right? The headlines would become "airliner crashes after crew couldn't thread the needle for 45 min"
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Do forecasted storms go into the fuel estimate formulas?
Yes. Even not forecasted storms in the form of a probability of wind at low altitude when the engines are at their least efficient. And tradewinds at altitude, which are quite variable as well.
const estimateFuel = (distanceInKms, litersPerKm) => distanceInKms * litersPerKm;
I don't even know what I'm talking about, but you at least forgot to account for headwinds and differing drag amounts at different altitudes/speeds.
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Under FAA rules this was a screwup. [edit: see my own reply] (However, the rules are subtle, so they can be partially forgiven.) However, I'm not only a dispatcher but also a philosophy BA, so I've found a good way to explain it.
Your reserve fuel (the "extra" fuel over what the actual flight burn) can of course be used (hello, that's what it's there for) but—and here's the rub—you can never plan on using it.
That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
You may only dip into your reserve when you have no other choice. In this case, when the only fuel they had left was reserve, they are obligated by law to proceed to the alternate airport, which clearly they did not do [correction: they did do the proper thing; see my 2nd reply below]. No bueno.
[this is a slight simplification (minor details omitted for brevity) but the kernel of the issue is properly described]
Update: OK, if *Edinburgh* was their alternate and they missed there and were then forced to bugout for Manchester, that's then an example of when reserve is OK to be burned. (The 'slight simplification' I omitted was unpacking how the alternate fuel plays into the process, but here, that was a key part of the series of events.) That's what I get for not reading TFA first :-/
Not really, you should have enough fuel to make it to multiple alternatives or make emergency landing somewhere else. You should never burn that last 45 mins unless you want to make the news and file a lot of paperwork.
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"Under FAA rules this was a screwup."
Not necessarily. And I get that you've caveated yourself with an edit and a reply etc, but lets assume that you're not hedging for the moment.
They carried required reserves on departure. Multiple approaches thwarted by extreme unforseen weather. They declared Mayday Fuel, which is mandatory under EASA regulations, when reserve fuel use became unnavoidable. They diverted to the nearest suitable airport.
Landing with 220kg is close, but within bounds of a declared fuel emergency.
Crew decision to declare Mayday and divert was proper airmanship, not negligence.
Yes, reserve fuel may not be planned for. But it may be used. It's there for a reason. Your accusation doesn't account for dynamic evolving weather and realtime decision making.
I'm an instrument rated pilot and an advanced ground instructor under FAA and I fly IMC in bad weather as single pilot IFR around the pacific northwest and colorado.
This is the right answer.
Was this good/bad? Idk Room for improvement? Maybe? Clearer direction with the benefit of hindsight? Maybe. but the majority of the sentiment in the responses is coming from people not type rated in a 737.
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Some commenters are claiming the flight should have never taken off and that the weather situation was entirely predictable. What's your take on that?
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> That is to say, in this case, when they missed their first or second approach, they CANNOT say, "We'll use our reserve fuel and make another go at it" because that would be intentionally planning to burn your reserve.
Is that what happened? That's not in the article, what's the source?
And other comments here are saying the third attempt was in Edinburgh, so they were already trying to land anywhere possible by the third attempt.
At what point are you saying they chose to plan on using reserves when they still had any option for landing without reserves?
OP didn’t have the full picture. They’ve offered appropriate edits/updates
> you can never plan on using it
In off-roading, we have a similar rule with 4 wheel drive. You don't use it to go in, you use it to get out.
in what way do FAA rules apply to operators doing a European to UK flight in an airline that doesn't operate in the US?
Similar philosophies but with differences. e.g. FAA reserve requirements is destination + alternate + 45 mins reserve. EASA is destination + alternate + final reserve which is 30 mins holding for jets and 45 mins for pistons IIRC. But in both cases it's that idea of a destination, an alternatite, and additional. And then there's the requirements around whether you need an alternate, etc.
See my comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45541096 [I am expert in CFR 14 Part 121, so I made reference to the regulations I'm qualified to directly speak on.]
I was wondering that too. I've taken it to mean "if this situation had happened in the Americas..." as the most generous interpretation I can make.
If you're into your reserves you should declare an emergency immediately to get priority in air traffic sequencing and control.
Pilots may be organizationally disincentivized when making this decision.
It's required when using your reserve under EASA to declare Mayday Fuel.
> Under FAA rules this was a screwup
An oversight I'm sure they can fix ;-)
FAA as a yardstick? Hm
Looks like they tried two attempts to land in Prestwick over two hours, then flew to Edinburgh and made one aborted landing, then finally went to Manchester.
What a nerve wracking experience for those pilots. I wonder if on the final attempt they knew they had to force it down no matter what.
Per the FlightRadar24 logs, it looks like only about 45min was wasted over Prestwick, not 2hrs. First approach was around 18:06, and they're breaking off to head for Edinburgh by about 18:51.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.
I don't think we know yet when min fuel was declared. At that point, they will be resequenced. Then we need to know when mayday fuel was declared. It sounds pretty odd, like perhaps there were multiple simultaneous situations and the crew did not have adequate information.
About 5 years ago before ATC recordings became mainstay on YouTube, there was an American pilot that declared an emergency at JFK and very firmly said "we are turning back and landing NOW. Get the aircraft OFF all runways".
He was low in fuel and also frustrated with Kennedy ATC because he declared "minimum fuel" earlier and was still getting vectored around. (I know "minimum fuel" is not an emergency and has a very precise meaning).
They must have been very close to running out. But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I’m guessing that pilot had also been taught the lesson of Avianca 052, which crashed at JFK because the FO / captain did not explicitly declare a fuel emergency.
JFK ATC in particular has an enormous workload with many international flights, combined with direct, even conflictual at times, NY communication style. It puts the onus on the pilot for conveying the message to ATC, rather than ATC for extracting the message from the pilot.
You might be thinking of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQuHnrJu1I
For comparison, this is what can happen when the pilots are not that assertive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052
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> But it was a valuable lesson learned in speaking up before you get to that point.
I'm not sure it was a lesson learned per-se because the captain was merely doing his job as fundamentally defined.
A captain has ultimate responsibility for the aircraft.
However there is a side question in relation to your post...
When you say "declared an emergency" in your post, the more interesting question would be whether it was actually formally declared by the captain (i.e. "MAYDAY") or whether the captain was merely "working with" ATC at a lower level, maybe "PAN" or maybe just informal "prioritised".
If the captain DID declare "MAYDAY" earlier in the timeframe then yes, Kennedy would have a lot to answer for if they were spending excessive time vectoring around.
But if the captain did not formally declare and then came back later and started bossing Kennedy around, that would be a different set of questions, focused on the captain.
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Assuming it wasn't just luck, it seems impressive they managed to maximize their (landing attempts/fuel reserves) ratio like that.
It is a requirement [1] to land with 45 minutes of fuel remaining, if the pilots go under that, it is considered an incident. As soon as estimated landing fuel goes under the limit, the flight needs to declare an emergency (as was done in this case).
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F... is the US rule, EASA has a similar rule.
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They got within a hair of crashing, there is nothing impressive about this. 30 minutes, ok, you still get written up but this is cutting it way too fine.
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Context: because of bad weather.
But I'm truly surprised (in a bad way) people on the ground couldn't solve the situation earlier. The plane was in an emergency situation for hours, wtf.
Also, the airport density in the UK is high, they should have been diverted since before the first attempt, as it has happened to me and thousands of flights every single day around the world.
The incident investigation will surely focus on exactly those things. But: just like shipping aviation is at the mercy of the weather and even though the rules (which are written in plenty of blood) try to anticipate all of the ways in which things go wrong there is a line beyond which you are at risk. I've had one triple go-around in my life and it soured me on flying for a long time afterwards because I have written software to compute the amount of fuel required for a flight and I know how thin the margins are once you fail that third time. I am not going to get ahead of the investigation and speculate but I can think of at least five ways in which this could have happened, and I'm mostly curious about whether the root cause is one of those five or something completely different. Note that until there is weight on the wheels you don't actually know how much fuel remains in the tanks, there always is some uncertainty, to the pilots it may well have looked as if the tanks were already empty while they were still flying the plane. Those people must have been extremely stressed out on that final attempt to land.
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Armchair quarterbacking it, but it was human error. They should have diverted sooner and been more aware of the weather.
Edit: there might also be part of Ryanair culture that contributed, but that's speculation.
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> One pilot who reviewed the log said: “Just imagine that whenever you land with less than 2T (2,000kg) of fuel left you start paying close attention to the situation. Less than 1.5T you are sweating. But (220kg) is as close to a fatal accident as possible.”
Now that is range anxiety.
> The Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks when it finally landed, according to a picture of what appears to be a handwritten technical log. Pilots who examined the picture said this would be enough for just five or six minutes of flying.
For reference, passenger airlines immediately declare emergency if their planned flight path would put them under 30 minutes of fuel (at least in the US). Landing with 5 minutes remaining of fuel is very atypical
220kg is about 1% of the plane's fuel capacity. They must've had a lot of faith in their fuel probes.
For anyone interested, here is the flight playback:
https://fr24.com/data/flights/fr3418#3c7f91f4
Sub required.
I can wait for the Pete the Irish Pilot’s take though.
this one is available - https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/RYR3418/history/2025...
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Better links
https://avherald.com/h?article=52dfe5d7&opt=0
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1nzet3a/flight_a_...
Quoted:
Incident: Malta Air B738 at Prestwick, Edinburgh and Manchester on Oct 3rd 2025, landed below minimum fuel By Simon Hradecky, created Sunday, Oct 5th 2025 14:39Z, last updated Friday, Oct 10th 2025 15:02Z
A Malta Air Boeing 737-800 on behalf of Ryanair, registration 9H-QBD performing flight FR-3418 from Pisa (Italy) to Prestwick,SC (UK), was on final approach to Prestwick's runway 20 when the crew went around due to weather. The aircraft entered a hold, then attempted a second approach to runway 20 about 30 minutes after the go around, but again needed to go around. The aircraft again entered a hold, about 10 minutes after entering the hold the crew decided to divert to Edinburgh,SC (UK) where the aircraft joined the final approach to runway 24 about one hour after the first go around but again went around. The aircraft subsequently diverted to Manchester,EN (UK) where the aircraft landed on runway 23R about 110 minutes after the first go around.
On Oct 5th 2025 The Aviation Herald received information that the aircraft landed below minimum fuel with just 220kg fuel (total, 100kg in left and 120 kg in right tank) remaining.
The aircraft returned to service about 13 hours after landing.
On Oct 10th 2025 the AAIB reported the occurrence was rated a serious incident and is being investigated.
A passenger reported after the first go around at Prestwick the crew announced, they would do another attempt to land at Prestwick, then divert to Manchester. Following the second go around the crew however announced they were now diverting to Edinburgh, only after the failed approach to Edinburgh the crew diverted to Manchester.
> the Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks... enough for just five or six minutes of flying
Maybe I'm just unaware, but it's crazy to me that these planes burn 40 kilograms of jet fuel per minute.
I don’t think that’s so much? A car burns 1 liter to travel 15 kilometer’ish, and carries 4 people.
An airplane burns 40 liters to travel 15 kilometers too (900 kph), but carries 160 people.
That’s about 40x more than the car, so the fuel economy per passenger is about the same.
Of course jet fuel is probably a bit more polluting, but it’s still interesting how close it is.
The greenhouse effects of flying is about 3-5x the effect of just burning the fuel.
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In commercial aviation (passenger/cargo), typically about half the take-off weight is fuel. That's not half the payload weight (pax + cargo + fuel), it's half the takeoff weight.
For a medium-range flight (say ~2000 mi / 3200 km) each passenger incurs somewhat more than their own weight in fuel.
I don't think that's correct. The MTOW (Maximum Take-Off Weight) of an A320ceo is 78,000 kg, while the max fuel capacity is approximately 24,210 litres. Using Jet A-1's density of roughly 0.804 kg/L, that's about 19,460 kg of fuel, which represents only 25% of the take-off weight. The OEW (Operating Empty Weight) for that aircraft is approximately 42,600 kg, which means you'd need the fuel to weigh around 35,400 kg for your "half the take-off weight is fuel" claim to be true—nearly double the actual fuel capacity.
Even for a long-range aircraft like the A350-900, with an MTOW of 280,000 kg and a fuel capacity of approximately 138,000 litres (roughly 111,000 kg at 0.804 kg/L), fuel represents about 40% of the take-off weight. The OEW is approximately 155,000 kg, meaning even a completely empty plane (except for crew) loaded with maximum fuel still wouldn't reach your claimed 50% fuel fraction.
Yeah, when people say "flying has a high carbon footprint", they're not kidding. It's really quite massive.
I don't fly any more.
Want to bake your noodle?
Because the market responds to your behavior by slightly lowering the cost of flying to fill those seats, demand increases to match from slightly lower income people. Because they then organize their lives slightly more around cheap flights, it gets even harder to lower the impact of flying.
Paradoxically, rich people like us (you're a tech worker too...) flying more, because we're less sensitive to price, leave more room for pricing in carbon reduction strategies in the tickets/taxes. If you have more seats from the lower end of the market... you don't have as much flexibility in solutions.
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Don't look up the carbon footprint of driving then. That is even higher in comparison to most passenger flights.
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Especially crazy considering the 737 is not a particularly large commercial aircraft.
40kg/minute is around 12 gallons (47 liters) of fuel per minute. Meanwhile a 777 burns around 42 gallons (160 liters) per minute. A 747 burns 63 gallons (240 liters) per minute - more than a gallon per second!
Is that at cruising altitude?
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Each of the four F1 engines on the Saturn V burned 1.8 metric tonnes of liquid oxygen and 0.8 tonnes of rocket fuel every second.
And each engine's propellant pumps required 55,000 HP to deliver that propellant.
40kg of fuel per minute is a lot but airplanes carry a lot of people.
Web searches suggest a 737-800 gets about 0.5mpg at cruise. With 189 passengers in a one-class layout that’s 95mpg per passenger. With 162 in a two-class layout that’s 81mpg per passenger.
This is better than a single person in a car but four people in a Prius gets 50mpg * 4 = 200 mpg.
This is what vexes me about the lack of emphasis on highway self-driving. Everyone's obsessed with robo taxis.
An overnight trip that's automated could go at 40 mph and get seriously good gas mileage. I mean man with four people would probably get almost 100 miles per gallon.
And this would eliminate a lot of short-range flights
It should be a lot easier to implement than having to worry about a whole class of problems that robo taxis in cities have
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That is why some people avoid flying for environmental reasons. Planes use crazy amounts of fuel.
Look at it (2.5 t/h) by volume (0.82 kg/L): 3 kL/h (790 gal/h) == 50 L/m (13 gal/m) == 830 mL/s (0.9 qt/s), and then divide the total flow rate by 2 for rate per engine.
Or divide the total by the number of passengers (~189) flying to consider effective fuel economy (per passenger) or 13 kg/pax/h or 3.6 g/pax/s.
They must plan to never land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, or about 1.25 t, and I'd say they should never, ever land with less than 15 minutes in their career during a pan/mayday bingo fuel emergency.
> 40 kilograms of jet fuel per minute.
That is going to vary considerably between cruising and ascending.
Possibly related, but not definite, this apparently has happened before with Ryan Air.
https://avherald.com/h?article=454af355
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/exclusi...
These were not definitive but it did raise concerns due to the budget nature of the airline.
It reminds me of a Transavia flight from Girona to Rotterdam that had to be diverted to Amsterdam back in 2015 (1 attempt at Rotterdam, decided to divert to Amsterdam, then 2 attempts in Amsterdam).
It was a particularly stormy weekend and it turns out from the article that they had 992kg of fuel left:
https://avherald.com/h?article=489d4c3f
Massive respect for pilots and the job they do.
The latest Captains Speaking podcast has an discussion about one of the hosts being in a similar situation: https://youtu.be/5ovlZ221tDQ
Fortunately, the flight left with extra fuel, because it was cheaper to carry excess from the origin airport than to buy it at the destination airport, so reserve fuel wasn't needed, but it was close. Also, there was lots of lightning.
I absolutely love insights like this into areas of the world I have no knowledge. Makes absolute sense in the modern world but also something I'd not think about
Trucking companies started adding this to their logistics about a decade ago as well. Once they had accurate fuel price information for most of the country they started telling their drivers precisely how much fuel to onboard at each stop.
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As a naive person, I have a simple question - why would they even fly to an airport where there's 100mph winds? Wouldn't ATC know this and tell the flight way in advance to fly to a different destination?
Because the weather is very changeable. You may get a lull in the wind for a couple of mins, enough to land.
I've been on a couple of flights like that. Once where we did two attempts and landed on the 2nd, the other where we did 3 but the had to divert. Other planes were just managing to land in the winds before and after our attempts.
The other problem is (as I found out on that flight) that mass diversions are not good. The airport I diverted to in the UK had dozens of unexpected arrivals, late at night. There wasn't the ground staff to manage this so it took forever to get people off. It then was too full to accept any more landings, so further flights had to get diverted further and further away.
So, if you did a blanket must divert you'd end up with all the diversion airports full (even to flights that could have landed at their original airport) and a much more dangerous situation as your diversions are now in different countries.
Forecasts are based on multiple weather simulation runs.
It's a often good working gamble that you will pick a short period of weather that is within your operational limits.
Commercial pilots don't have "personal limits". It's defined by their airplane and/or companies constraints.
I wonder if the pilots considered Newcastle (or Teeside)? The METARs showed favourable weather conditions at Newcastle and many planes landed there that day without issue I believe. Also far closer to Edinburgh than Manchester. I wonder if they thought that Manchester being further south, had a better chance of better weather?
This very recent Mentour documentary is extremely relevant, came to mind immediately. Multiple redirects due to bad weather, extreme "Get-there-itis" and eventually running out of fuel.
Great edutainment if you're feeling in the mood for that. If you're inpatient you can skip to 14 minutes, before that it's just backstory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK_7q9tixX4
The only real question for the inquiry is how the decision was made to divert to Edinburgh and whether that was a reasonable decision at the time.
And then from Edinburgh to Manchester (184 miles) instead of Newcastle (91 miles) or Teeside (125 miles), both airports Ryanair operate out of.
Most of the trains north between Preston and Glasgow were being cancelled that day due to the weather. Perhaps knowing they only had one more attempt at landing safely left, Manchester further south seemed like the better bet.
I look forward to watching this one on Mentour Pilot
You'll probably have to wait a while. Petter is pretty insistent on waiting for the full incident report so that he can be completely thorough and avoid speculating.
Given it's Ryanair I doubt we will see it, still hope so (Peter works for them)
I believe he's retired
The headline is about the landing, but the issue here happened at takeoff. There were 100 mph winds at the destination and this was their 4th fallback attempt and their third airport. This flight should never have taken off, the risk of multiple diversions was easily predictable, but the flight took off headed toward an airport in dangerous conditions, got diverted to a second airport that was just as dangerous, then finally to a third where conditions were so bad other flights were being cancelled (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/storm-amy-brings-flight-chaos-2019...) and where it finally landed because it was either land at that airport or land somewhere that is not at all an airport. Once this flight was in the air, disaster was more or less inevitable and we lucked into a narrow eviting window.
This seems to be a case where the error was that the 2nd diversion was to another commercial/passenger airport. The situation after it was determined Edinburgh was a no-go was dire and making it to an airport like Manchester was a luxury they did not have safe fuel for.
> The pilots had been taking passengers from Pisa in Italy to Prestwick in Scotland on Friday evening, but wind speeds of up to 100mph meant they were unable to land.
> After three failed attempts to touch down, the pilots of Ryanair flight FR3418 issued a mayday emergency call and raced to Manchester, where the weather was calmer.
#1 - if Prestwick had wind speeds up to 100mph, then why the h*ll was the airport not closed down?
#2 - if the pilots had experienced conditions that dire during their first two landing attempts at Prestwick, then why the h*ll did they stick around for a third attempt?
EDIT: The article's a big vague, but it seems to have been 2 attempts at Prestwick, then 1 at Edinburgh, then the last-minute "oops, do I really want to die today?" decision to run to Manchester.
Looks like the third attempt was actually in Edinburgh
The third attempted landing was in their diversion airport, Edinburgh, not a third at Prestwick.
The third attempt was in Edinburgh, looks like.
This one is pretty straightforward so it doesn't need an AAIB report. Failure of pilots to brief destination weather conditions and anticipate proper bingo fuel accordingly. Storms in the area == brief max go arounds, brief alternates, and carry extra fuel. They screwed up by taking unnecessary risks of too many go arounds and barely making an alternate because they didn't play it safe by carrying additional fuel. Take these bold pilots to the chief pilot's office for an uncomfortable conversation without tasty snacks.
United Airlines Flight 173 ran out of fuel while circling Portland International Airport trying to troubleshoot a landing gear. Six more minutes of fuel could have helped the airliner to land in the Columbia river by the airport or belly land on the runway. The captain chose to keep troubleshooting and crashed just 6 miles away from the airport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_173
Are there any good online databases with fuel level details for individual commercial flights? I've been on a few flights that had to circle for a long time / had a number of go-round attempts, and I've never been able to find details after the fact about how close to the margins we were.
Can anyone say whether airline pilots make each diversion decision solely based on their own information and judgment, or do they loop in the company?
Airline captain here.
We definitely involve the dispatcher in the diversion decision. Especially if it's an unplanned diversion, where the big-picture view the dispatcher has is very useful for us in our metal tube.
Sure, company dispatchers are usually part of the conversation, and in non-emergency diversions (i.e. the vast majority), they may suggest specific airports that would be more convenient for company logistics. But the final decision is always the pilots' - and once they've declared an emergency, more or less every single airfield, including military, becomes available to them.
Unless they are in an emergency and are busy with aviating, they will coordinate with their dispatcher on diverting, even if only to verify that the weather at the intended alternate is still favorable. Per the FAA regulations, the PIC and the dispatcher have joint operational control over the flight. Of course, at the end of the day, only the pilots have their hands on the controls, so they can make the plane do what they want—but from a legal standpoint, the dispatcher and pilot-in-command have equal & shared responsibility for the safe operation of the flight.
I realize this is a UK carrier and was operating in the EU/UK, but for the most part, the rest of the world uses the US legal framework for aviation as a boilerplate for their own civil code. Yes, there are some differences, but these are usually minor and more of "differences in quantity" rather than "differences in kind". [Since the airplane was invented here the US had a head start on regulating civil aviation.]
This happened in my country with I think a Vistara flight, where they had 5 minutes of fuel left.
I myself went from Bangalore to Delhi a couple of weeks back, and the poor pilots told the air hostesses at least twice or thrice to prepare for landing but the plane did not land until much much later.
Had a 1 maybe 1.5h holding pattern in Oslo once in Ryanair where they hoped they could land in extreme snow. Then diverted in the end (surprise!). Happened in 2009 though. Joked they were very desperate to land at Oslo because they cant afford to divert.
And that is how fuel reservoir requirements rise for all. Im sure, the whole airline industry is looking at the whole markets share prices going down- writing happy songs and packing gift baskets for Ryanair.
On the positive side, if they had made a crash landing with so little fuel, there would not likely have been a fiery explosion, and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
Air + fuel explodes just fine. You really don't want to crash an airliner. At landing speed the number of people dead will still be > 0 and the remainder has a good chance of being injured seriously.
For instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951
This happened at landing speed (the airport is only a few hundred meters from the crash site) and the plane was at the end of its flight from Turkey, it did not catch fire. Still, 9 people perished and the remainder were all but one injured 11 of them seriously.
Only 7% died, pretty good for a plane of that size with a rough landing.
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that was equipment failure crew had to fight it, not something predictable like running out of fuel
> and many more passengers would have survived than normal?
This[1] kind of crash landing is very rare (in that case there was no fire despite being immediately after take off, perhaps because of the cold). Normally an outcome like this is only reasonable to expect if you actually reach a runway despite being out of fuel. Like Gimli[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_System_F...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Username checks out. I don’t think the fire is your first concern in a plane crash.
Well there'd probably be a fire but not a sustained fire which would improve survivability.
Even fighter jets have more fuel reserves when they land. This is insane.
Looks like the emergency reserve management worked?
The Guardian can’t be trusted with their sensationalist headlines.
The flight couldn’t land in 3 other airports and eventually declared emergency.
Why such a large surplus?
The plane landed with approx 67 gallons of fuel. They typically land with 670 gallons.
A US gallon of Kerosene weights approx 6.5 lbs
Guess which airline I won't be flying with next time...
So this is about the stopping problem, but for airplane fuel, kinda?
Ryanair: Cutting cost at all cost
Yup. They also popularised excessive baggage under the seat, and I routinely used to see obvious hazards that would impede an evacuation. Staff would turn a blind eye. Probably still do
Further, with the baggage being there in easy reach under the seat, I reckon people would be more tempted to take it with them when evacuating.
That they're are a safe airline seems to be incredible luck - they have all the components for it not to be.
Each passenger will be required to bring a 5 gallon can of JET A.
Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday...
Is it like in the car where you have no fuel left but there’s a reserve of another 10 liters?
Yes and no. I had this happen recently and looked into it.
My wife has been using my car, which is a Diesel Golf with a fuel capacity of 14.5 gallons. We set off driving one Saturday to visit my parents, and I noticed the fuel gauge was below empty already. By the time I got to the gas station, I put 14.3 gallons of fuel into it. I calculated that that works out to be about a cup and a half of fuel.
So once you hit empty on my car, you definitely have a ways you can drive still. I feel comfortable driving about 30+ miles, and it's never died on me. That puts it at no more than 1 gallon of fuel left in the car based on my experience (not scientific I know, but I've owned 2 of these cars, with about 190k total driven miles). It's a lot less than 10 liters from E to Dead on the roadside.
You shouldn't tempt fate with a diesel, or any direction injection car for that matter. The high pressure pump will shred itself very quickly as the diesel is used for lubrication.
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probably depends between cars. on my old civic fuel light is ~5L/1.3 gallons
It's more like
* enough reserve to waste some in traffic. On top of that * enough reserve to find gas station. On top of that * enough reserve to drive to neighbouring city for gas station. On top of that * enough to cruise 30 minutes around that neighbouring city looking for other gas station in case the previous ones were closed. On top of that * enough station to run around parking lot looking for space to park
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Another metric conversion error?
Sounds like pilot error - they didn't pay the extra fee to have reserve fuel.
"Worth it" - Ryanair probably
I imagine the next step will be RyanAir asking passengers to carry fuel cans onto the plane. B*tards.
Between overworked, understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots, I'm expecting some major disasters in the coming years.
One of the problems with modern internet discourse is there is an implicit assumption that the problem of one country is automatically the problem of another country.
I think that's just Americans tbh.
Flights operate internationally?
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I've never heard of any of these problems with RyanAir. They treat you as less than cattle and generally their service is shit, but I'm not aware of RyanAir being unsafe.
Actually, in a quick check it seems the total fatality count for RyanAir is zero, with only two (on-fatal) major incidents (2008, 2021). That's seems a pretty good track record considering the amount of flights they do.
Yeah there's a lot of hatred of Ryanair given their somewhat pugnacious attitude. But as far as I know they don't mess around when it comes to safety.
> Between overworked, understaffed ATC and undertrained pilots, I'm expecting some major disasters in the coming years.
Maybe in the US, but this story is based in Europe, each country maintains a regulated standard and there are no EU wide disruptions that have ever happened to the best of my knowledge. Also Ryanair don't travel transatlantic flights.
Three weeks ago in Nice, France it was a fraction of a second away from two A320s crashing [0] and possibly hundreds of deaths, similar to Tenerife disaster [1].
Investigation is ongoing and many factors are at play (bad weather, extra work for ATC due to that, confusing lighting of runways etc) but also, from French media reports, there used to be 15 people per shift 5y ago in Nice ATC, now there are just 12, and traffic is higher.
Many people left the profession during Covid and haven't been replaced.
[0] https://avherald.com/h?article=52d656fd&opt=0
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
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Ryanair does use low-hour fresh-out-of-training pilots though. Certainly not the only airline that does that either.
I mean, the US also hasn't had any widespread waves of disruptions that led to incidents or flight problems. Same as the EU. American flights and airspace are usually safer too, statistically speaking.
Why? Is ATC a problem in other countries than the US? Are they also under training pilots? If anything RyanAir with its flamboyant history of cost cutting (CEO always threatening to charge for use of the onboard lavatory) seems a more likely source than the flying infrastructure itself.
Ryanair has a very good safety history, among the highest in the world.
They make outrageous claims for publicity, and their customer experience is all about hidden extras and "gotcha" pricing, but I don't think they fuck around when it comes to safety.
They know that with their reputation they would be sunk if they did have a major incident.
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What indication is there that our pilots are undertrained?
I am just a PPL, and that was not an easy thing to accomplish (most pilots complete 50% more hours than required before they are able to pass that test), but my impression is that western training standards for commercial pilots are incredibly high, and the safety record seems to back that up.
Its arguably too high, constraining the supply of pilots, and the supply of well-paying jobs, resulting in things like Colgan Air Flight 3407.
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Internet vibes, basically.
This had nothing to do with any of that tho.
Pilots are ultimately the ones who are responsible for when and where to land, when to divert, and how much fuel to take along.
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Closely followed by the ritual lampooning of some senior middle managers who by the fish-in-barrel method were discovered to not be doing very much.
Story time, from my past.
Waiting on full flight in Europe, good airport, for take off. Pilot says over speaker : " We are delayed becuase FUEL guy got UPSET on tarmac and has QUIT. We know need someone ELSE to fill the plane with FUEL. " Said in a COMPLETELY nonchalant voice.
Immediately I get concerned, try not to think what cause a FUEL TECH to QUIT regarding THIS PLANE and fuel issue. Just close my eyes, relax.
2 minutes later pilot comes on intercom again "For some WEIRD reason, someone wants to get off the plane. Now we have to wait for ground crew to find his suitcasebecause of rules. How annoying.."
Plane waits for an hour on tarmac for BOTH passenger to get off and for FUEL to be finally "resolved".
Arrive eventually at destination.
Most of the trouble would have been avoided if the pilot had not sounded nonchalant about a "NON ISSUE about FUEL that a technician just QUIT OVER". I swear i even rememebr saying the statement with a hint of humour, like what on earth is the problem.
This is a true story, and the fact this incompetence happened to me, well I wouldnt have believed it otherwise.
I imagine everyone involved know that they are doing dangerous things, not taking a drop more fuel than is legally required for profit, knowing that none of that is going to change unless there is a major accident... They keep[1] landing these planes with X minutes of fuel left, but it doesn't do anything, until some plane falls from the sky with 0 minutes of fuel left then everyone knew all along and the rules are changed and nobody is held accountable.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19267153
lacking fuel in plane that has not started flying isn't exactly something that should stress anyone and most definitely non issue
You missed the point of the story, the issue was not lack of fuel, it was a crew member quitting because of a fuel issue, most likely a misunderstanding.
Fuel misunderstandings have resulted in numerous serious incidents, try googling it bro