Friends have been emailing me about the chartered airliner that apparently ran out of fuel just short of the destination in Colombia (see BBC for a map). How could this have happened, they wonder. I responded with the full list of gliding airliners from Wikipedia, of which United 173 was perhaps the most sobering example (three experienced pilots up in the front, one of them a flight engineer with nothing better to do than check the gauges).
This latest crash reminds us that even a professional airline crew is not immune to get-there-itis. They almost surely realized that they would be right on the margin when landing at the destination but nonetheless they pressed on with more hope than good sense.
Now that so many airplanes have Internet connectivity (at least via Iridium) I would love to see my ground monitoring idea implemented. The pilots of LaMia 2933 could then have heard a voice in their headset saying “Guys: I’m looking at the same fuel gauges that you are and you just have to divert to Bogota.” Alternatively, now that computer programs are smart enough to drive a car (sort of), why not an autonomous system with a camera mounted above the pilots’ heads? The camera can see all of the indicators that the pilots can see and speak up with “the FMS shows you going to Medellin but you barely have enough fuel to make it to Bogota with a 45-minute reserve” or “I can see the flight plan and also the datalink weather; looks like you’ll be going through an area of thunderstorms that could be avoided if you take a route that is only 10 minutes longer.”
But it looks like the pilots were told to stay in a holding pattern for 15+ minutes. What’s the procedure in such case: you’re the captain of a plane and you’re told to stay in a holding pattern while running out of fuel: can you ignore the tower and attempt the landing anyway?
Ev: I didn’t know that they were asked to hold. That’s terrible. To your question… A pilot can reject any ATC instruction, including a holding instruction. You declare an emergency and then tell the controllers what you’re going to do. Of course the airline might fire you for not diverting before the fuel situation became an emergency. Or the regulators might suspend your pilot certificate either for almost running out of gas or declaring an emergency when you weren’t truly running out of gas.
The gentle way to reject the hold is to say “minimum fuel” to ATC. That tells them that you have enough fuel to complete the flight but not to complete the flight and also fly around for a bunch of time. If ATC insists for whatever reason then the pilot can say “Fuel emergency. Landing Runway 27” or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52 is an example of a 1990 flight (coincidentally from Medellin) that ran out of fuel near JFK due to accepting holding instructions despite a below-minimum fuel situation.
“The camera can see all of the indicators that the pilots can see and speak up with “the FMS shows you going to Medellin but you barely have enough fuel to make it to Bogota with a 45-minute reserve” ”
Now that is a smart smart system. I think we will have to wait a while for that. What would be nice in the meantime is a security camera for shopowners that can sense when a robbery is beginning and can call the cops by itself and maybe even zoom in on the perps and get a good face shot plus any jewelry, tats, or other identifying marks. I suspect that might be something we can nearly do now.
The rumors I’ve heard are that the flight had skipped a scheduled fuel stop, and the distance of its flight without the stop would have been right on the edge of its full-fuel range. And, given the number of people on board, the plane either took off over gross or with a partial fuel load.
Furthermore, the captain of the flight was evidently the owner of the airline, which was down to one flyable aircraft (can you even call a company with one airplane an airline?).
It might be that penny-pinching is what doomed that flight.
Management rule: Never put your entire team on an airline with just one flyable aircraft.
Here is a question for all you pilots: wot about hydroplaning? I was recently on a passenger plane that landed in heavy rain (and did not hydroplane). Is this a problem in the real world or are the planes in practice heavy enough to push away the water or something? (Well, above a certain size, I guess?)
Smart Systems Boi,
Actually, that sounds pretty straightforward to me.
Watson
Tom –
Vehicles with rounded tire crowns, like bicycles, motorcycles, and airplanes, are almost, but not quite, immune from hydroplaning. It’s only cars with their flat crown (enabled by the stiff and angled steel belts) that can plane on the surface of the water. Rounded tire crowns just force the water out to the sides quite easily.
Poor braking action reports by prior arrivals are NOT indications of hydroplaning. A hydroplaning aircraft would report NO braking or steering action…after groundloops and stopping in the grass or in the Shell station across the street from Midway 🙂
The grooves in tires for airplanes & motorcycles are for largely for monitoring tire wear.
The grooves in road bicycles tires are for show & marketing (obviously, off-road cycles are a different matter). Jobst Brandt gave several wonderful explanations of this:
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/slicks.html
http://yarchive.net/bike/slicks.html
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.bicycles.tech/wKW3qupAuP0
That said, NASA and others have studied aircraft tire hydroplaning, and it can be made to happen, although the variability is huge:
http://www.nlr-atsi.nl/downloads/hydroplaning-of-modern-aircraft-tires.pdf
Tom: If you were in the U.S., probably one reason that you didn’t hydroplane is that the runway was grooved. See http://blog.aopa.org/flighttraining/?p=2783 and http://code7700.com/grooved_runways.html
The landing was at Barcelona/El Prat, and I couldn’t tell if there were any grooves. Searching mostly revealed amusing videos of near accidents (“el pratfalls”?) at said airport, so I still don’t know.
The reason for my question was basically that braking hard with a car in those weather conditions seemed troubling, while the plane managed to come to a stop quite sedately.