I’m not sure what the lack of vegetarian meals has to do with the man choking.
But regarding the lack of vegetarian meals, I’ve noticed that often, but not always, one of the “standard” meal options will be something vegetarian. Like the choice will be chicken or pasta, and the pasta maybe will have cheese, but no meat. It seems like if more airlines did that it would alleviate that issue.
A stone’s throw from where my grandpa lived.
The FB post I got the article from says:
The REACH 5 medical team said the pilot, Chad Millward, and paramedic, Margaret “DeDe” Davis, are in critical but stable condition and the nurse, Susan “Suzie” Smith, is in critical, unstable condition.
Gonna be a long road back for all 3. If they make it past this week.
Amazing how much more real / less statistical it gets when your learn their names.
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.
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.
Analysis of the log suggests the plane left Pisa with reserve fuel, as commercial flights are required to do.
To be fair, the pilots attempted several landings at two other airports before Manchester but could not due to crazy high wind speeds (100 mph reportedly).
Heaven forfend using your reserve fuel!
Don’t pilots need to declare a mayday if they dip into reserve fuel? (which I think these pilots did)
So, great to have but seems a big deal if they have to use it.
I’m curious…
What are the pilots supposed to do in this case when landing at Manchester? If conditions were not good enough to allow a landing there do they force it anyway and hope for the best? Because, at this point, there was not enough fuel to fly around and have another try. They’d run out of fuel and crash away from the airport, maybe in the city.
Eventually you end up in a situation where your choices are to land or run out of fuel and crash(land), so yes on approach to Manchester they were committed to landing.
That is a very ugly corner they backed themselves into, with massive “help” from Mother Nature (Gee, thanks Mom; you really shouldn’t have!).
Under the simplest base case in US regs, which are not universal …
The general concept behind preflight planning on nice days is you land with 45 minutes of fuel aboard, plus a few more (5-10) minutes for extended vectoring or slowdowns around the destination that are statistically likely.
If the weather sux (technical term), you are required to designate a different “alternate” airport with sufficiently less sucky (technical term) weather. And carry enough fuel to try to land once at the destination, then fly a plausible route and altitude to the alternate, then land there, with the 45 minutes fuel still remaining.
If holding is reasonably foreseeable, there’s another planning bucket for carrying hold fuel, anywhere from zero to 1 hour or more. Which can legitimately be fully expended on the way to the destination if needed. But which represents all of your normal safety cushion before you start getting into the abnormal last-ditch safety cushion of the 45 minutes. So the wise pilot is increasingly uncomfortable as the hold fuel dwindles and is actively working on changing that trend by doing something different than just sitting there being led around by ATC.
That’s planning. There is nothing legally preventing making a second attempt at the destination, which fuel is coming out of the 45 minutes, then making a run to the alternate when that too fails. But anybody with a brain knows they’re playing with fire if they do. If the reason for the original go-around was a one-off, like a truck pulled onto the runway in otherwise adequate conditions, you may be safer to take a second shot at the destination, rather than opening the fresh can of worms of going elsewhere. OTOH, if the weather is chaotic, bad, and expected to be long-lasting, the failure of your first attempt strongly suggests the second will be equally bad. In which breaking and running for the alternate is the wise thing to do.
As a practical matter, In 30+ years of doing that job I actually diverted after a failed landing attempt probably once or twice. And it instantly became dicey (as expected) because the planned fuel consumption to the alternate is predicated on a probably more efficient routing and altitude than you can get from ATC in the teeth of a big airport having a weather meltdown. By the time you do get there, what looked good on paper 3 hours ago looks a lot less good on the fuel gauges now.
Far more often what happened in our operations was you’d be holding at some high-intermediate altitude 100 miles short of the destination. And running forward calcs for “If we left holding now, what would our fuel be at touchdown, with some fudge factor for crappy vectoring near the destination?” As that number counts down towards the planned burn from failed destination landing to alternate airport, plus 45, plus a fudge factor for vectoring at the alternate, we begin planning to go somewhere else. Which may be the planned alternate, or may be yet another airport more conveniently located for where we are at the moment.
The big point there being that as the fuel along the planned routing gets critical, we cut and run to the alternate or other selection, without having burned the planned fuel to go from our present position (holding?) to the destination, then fail to land. Such that the moment the diversion starts, all our fuel concerns usually evaporate; we’ve just gained a large dollop of “just in case fuel” by the flying we just avoided.
In scenarios with few nearby airports at all, or few nearby airports with significantly better weather than the destination all this can get kinda tense. You win that game by being waaay ahead on making multiple contingency plans, evaluating each continuously and by being spring-loaded to run away once the trend starts leaning increasingly towards failure, not success. Far better to run than stay and fight to the last drop.
Burning into reserve (or recognizing that you will be before you get there) is not a per se emergency under US regs. But it is a sign of a rapidly deteriorating situation, and warning ATC of that is desirable. In many countries, an emergency declaration (“Mayday”) is the approved way to do that.
As always, the “right” answer is to have used superior judgement an hour ago to avoid having to do a desperate act of superior Yeagerism right now. But if they already missed that offramp, whether through bad skill, bad luck, or both, your point is well taken. What now, Batman?
An off-airport landing, and especially one after the engines quit, will be a multiple fatality event. The Air India 787 crash a couple months ago is a decent example of that scenario. Your odds in a river, lake, or near shore ocean are far better if one is available. Ask Sully.
An attempt to go around with very low fuel states may result in immediate fuel starvation; the tank outlets are set up so the last dregs are available while descending, not climbing. The big nose-up of a go-around, the fuel sloshing aft due to accelerating speed, and the simultaneous great increase in demanded fuel flow may have you start sucking wind right then and there.
All of us have discussed being in a must-land situation with low ceilings or vis. Taking an ILS or RNAV approach way past the published go-around point all the way to a blind flare & touchdown / impact is a high risk, but probably no-injuries resolution to being just about out of fuel.
If the issue is more like crazy winds, there’s a certain amount of above-normal flailing you can do to try to force the landing to work after you’d much rather have declared a go-around for a second try but fuel prevents. But, as we saw with that Korean 737 recently, an attempt to land that finally gets all the wheels on the runway with 2/3rds+ of it behind you guarantees you run off the end at speed then almost certainly hit something unforgiving. Which is also, absent EMAS, a guaranteed multi-fatality outcome. Even with EMAS, there is some (unknown to you) speed beyond which you coming out the other end is an engineering certainty. I’d sure rather go offroading into the bush, or out into a city doing 40 knots versus 140. But it’s still gonna wreck the jet and hurt a lot of people.
These kinds of extremis scenarios are generally not formally trained or planned for. There’s nothing to look up in the book even if you had time to do so. So it’s a combo of folklore and self-introspection on what you might do if you find yourself there. Somebody with little experience or little introspection may never have even thought about this and will probably blindly do the standard thing and run out of fuel during the go-around followed by an off airport impact.
There’s an old saying about running out of altitude, airspeed and ideas all at once. There oughta be a a 4th factor in that list: Fuel. But when you’re out of ideas, carefully considered pre-planned ideas, you’re probably screwed even if you still have enough the other three. Get short on any of them too and people start dying real soon.
I know of other close calls on fuel remaining. But this is the worst I’ve read of. Seriously sucks to be them about now, but they are alive & so is everyone else.
Flight nurse Suzie Smith has died.
Susan “Suzie” Smith, the longtime flight nurse who was among the three crew members injured when their helicopter crashed on a Sacramento freeway earlier this week, has died from her injuries, according to Reach Air Medical Services. She was 67.
I’m guessing those low hanging engines take out a lot of the wiggle room for gusty side winds. If their destination looks bad then diverting to an alternate seems like a prudent decision.
This is an interesting video (although I think the title is a tiny bit misleading):
Rather than watching a 23 minute video, can you tell us the gist?
History of phonetic alphabets. Quite light, interesting but not fascinating… IMO
Well…sure…
It is the history of how militaries use that language to read out letters over the radio. It takes 23 minutes to tell the whole story cuz it didn’t poof into existence. And, it tells the story of why they use those particular words (the list evolved over time).
IIRC, Mentour Pilot said in a video about a month ago that his airline mandates two go-arounds maximum at the first-try airport; after the second missed approach, you must head for the alternate.
Sounds like a sound policy, albeit one I’ve not worked under. It avoids getting stuck mentally in the “we almost made it last time, one more will be the charm” fallacy.
I recall a snowy day at the hub eons ago where roughly 50% of the jets were missing the approach and 50% were landing to the one available runway. Due to the strong winds and blowing snow it was luck of the draw whether you’d get to the decision point & see the runway or not.
It’d be sorta easy to convince yourself after one miss that surely you’ll make it next time since 50% of two tries equals one success, right? Wrong! You’ve got the same 50/50 shot next time around. That’s the Gamblers Fallacy and it suckers humans very reliably.
A Bell 222 crashed it the Cars and Copters event in Huntington Beach.
Two people aboard, and three people on the ground were taken to the hospital for injuries. It looks like a tail rotor failure, but I didn’t see the tail make contact with any of the palm trees. The tail rotor did separate from the aircraft after the failure.