Eleven Minutes Worth of Fuel
Jul 28th, 2008 by Alex
When you drive to work every day, the buck stops with you. You know from experience how long it takes to get home, probably down to the minute. You know that if you leave the house 3 minutes later it’ll take an extra 17 minutes to get to the office. You’ve got a good handle on how a major sporting event or traffic accident will impact your commute, regardless of weather conditions. You know that if you don’t fill up before heading home on Friday, you probably won’t make it due to the beach traffic on the Bay Bridge.
What if someone started telling you that you couldn’t fill up before heading home? Would you still be comfortable running with less gas in the tank? What if there was a huge backup and you ended up idling for an extra hour? Not a big deal, right? Worst case is you’d run out of gas and have to hail someone down or call AAA. What if you had to drive through a bad area of town?
Now picture yourself on a flight up the East coast, the little kid sitting behind you being quiet for the first time in eternity the past two hours. The pilot comes on the PA and says that there’s a slight backup, that there’s a few planes waiting to land and that you’re going to have to circle for a little bit. Nothing to worry about, right? There’s been no turbulence the whole ride and the flight attendant gave you the whole can of soda, so you can’t complain too much. So you circle for 10-15 minutes and land safely.
Did you know that there was only eleven minutes worth of fuel remaining when you landed?
That’s right.
Eleven minutes.
Probably not, since you’re on the ground now and just beginning to contemplate the hour-long wait you have waiting for your bags to appear on the baggage carousel. Most people deplane and don’t even think about the possibility that the plane could have been running low of fuel, let alone that the pilot may not have been too comfortable with the fuel situation. Now it hasn’t been eleven minutes per flight, but recently there hasn’t been as much fuel on board as the pilots would like. Can you blame them for worrying? Consider it, the pilot can’t just pull over to the side of the road. When the fuel pressure drops and you get a warning light, flying higher isn’t going to fix it. They can’t roll down the window and hail the state trooper over with his gas can. The stakes are higher. Mistakes and oversights are a lot bigger deal. In the case that an aircraft runs dry you’ll be lucky if you get to call NTSB, let alone AAA.
You never would have known. The flight crew sure as hell wouldn’t have told you. Causing a panic inside the aircraft isn’t going to fix anything, especially in an emergency situation. All the jokes — all cheap, thanks Hollywood — about pilots downing beers before their flights aside, they’re a professional bunch that are fiercely conservative when it comes to fueling up their aircraft. They want enough fuel to get there with plenty to spare, both for the passengers sake and their own. Everyone wants to come home to their spouse and children. I’m biased having grown up around commercial pilots my whole life, but that doesn’t change the responsibility placed in the hands of the pilots.
In fairness, the pilot does have fuel in reserve. But they shouldn’t have to break into that except in the case of emergencies or other unplanned problems, like an unplanned divert to an alternate airport or circling for a long time due to an obstruction on the runway. The pilots really don’t like breaking into their reserve, especially if there’s been no deviation from the flight plan. The aircraft ought to be fueled up enough to get from point A to point B with plenty of gas to spare, without touching the reserve.
It’s been widely publicized in print and web media that the airlines have been pressuring pilots to cut back on fuel load in order to cut costs. It’s true that jet fuel now represents the largest expense for commercial airlines, even surpassing labor. The airlines understandably want to make money and it does cost money to transport extra fuel around; more weight means more fuel required to lift/transport the extra weight. There’s all sorts of physics involved, but that’s the basic thing. But with all the weight cutting measures that the airlines are taking (replacing silverware with plastic utensils, for example) reducing the amount of fuel seems like a poor option. So does scheduling approaches with irregular and inefficient flap settings; yet another waste of fuel that is better served keeping the aircraft in the air. Or not being accurate with regard to flight times and wait times preceding the final clearance at the destination. If the flight plan people — who aren’t the same as the pilots who are following them — are saying that it’s going to take a half hour, it had better take a half hour or less. It had better not take more. The airline’s bean counters are effectively saying that they know more about the specifics of flight than the pilots. Worse, they seem to be willing the bet the lives of the passengers on it.
Having family in the airline industry, this bothers me.
These pilots — the ATPL-holding blokes — have tens of thousands of hours (maybe more) in the air and they know a hell of a lot more than the bean counters ever could. The little things like you know about your commute, the pilots know about their route. They know that it usually takes upwards of 20 minutes to get clearance to land at Philadelphia no matter what the flight plan specified. Even the most green pilots know that a low altitude orbit around BWI is going to burn a hell a lot more fuel than a higher orbit. The bottom line is that the pilots’ experience should trump whatever the corporate bean counters say. Even the FAA agrees. Federal Aviation Regulation 91.3 states quite clearly:
“The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft.”
That includes the safety of the passengers and the amount of fuel loaded onto the aircraft.
I’m young and I’m not a pilot and I may have some of the details muddled, but weighing lives against profits isn’t much of a decision to make. But for the airlines, it’s shameful that it is.
There is a column on Salon called “Ask The Pilot” (I’m too lazy to find the link) that says all this low fuel hysteria is just hype. The reserve includes enough fuel to make an emergency landing at an entirely different airport.
yellowjkt: I couldn’t find the link either, but Patrick Smith (the author of Salon’s Ask the Pilot column) is one man. In the past month, I know of two distinct pilots — completely independent of the media — that were shorted. I’m unaware of Mr. Smith’s recent commercial airline experience or qualifications, but it’s entirely plausible that he hasn’t been shorted by his dispatchers and planners yet. He probably hasn’t been taken aside to be “trained” to be more sensitive to fuel costs after he exercised his FAA-regulated right to request additional fuel. But it is happening. In an industry where your training record follows you around, the airline’s behavior feels more like a reprimand to me. That or passive aggressive behavior that doesn’t encourage pilots to speak up.