Ryanair Flight Landed at Manchester Airport with Six Minutes of Fuel Left
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A Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with only 6 minutes of fuel left after multiple failed landing attempts at other airports due to bad weather, sparking concerns about airline safety and pilot decision-making.
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Either Edinburgh (on the east coast) or Prestwick (on the west coast) are ok (one or the other or both) but in this case neither was suitable so the nearest was Manchester - definitely an edge-case.
I don't know how much fuel they had, or if they could've fitted any more on the plane but it was unusual circumstances.
There was a military plane right behind it with the same issue that night too.
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.
https://www.eurocockpit.eu/news/mayday-mayday-wins-over-ryan...
> In 2012 and 2013 “Brandpunt Reporter” broadcasted a two episode TV investigation in which Ryanair pilots, speaking anonymously, raised concerns about the airline’s fuel policies and company culture. The pilots revealed that the company may be exerting pressure on them to minimize the amount of fuel they take on board – a practice which limits significantly the fuel costs for the company but could jeopardise safety in certain circumstances. The direct reasons for this broadcast were 3 emergency landings of Ryanair aircraft in Valencia Spain on the 26 July 2012, within a short timeframe due to low fuel levels.
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.
The EU has shown us that you can safely have far fewer hours.
As a pilot I do think that nothing replaces butt in seat, but I also think that 1500 hours of instructing/aerial surveying/hour building is well into the diminished marginal returns area.
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.
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
15 down to 12 in 5 years with more traffic is not out of the question with advancements in technology but of course, if there is a report that shows understaffing then absolutely it should be addressed straight away and it will be, by the French government.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F... is the US rule, EASA has a similar rule.
Either this is true, or this is why there’s a 45 minute reserve requirement. There were three failed landing attempts in two airports prior to the successful landing, and they spent almost as much time attempting to land as the scheduled flight took.
Seems like this was exactly the scenario it was designed for?
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.
For comparison, this is what can happen when the pilots are not that assertive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_052
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.
In fact, it doesn’t even need to be the pilots who declare an emergency https://hsi.arc.nasa.gov/flightcognition/Publications/non_EA...
That may be so in the US.
But it is a bad habit to pick up.
Especially if you are an airline pilot and you frequently fly to destinations where English is not the first language.
Or indeed in US airspace where you frequently get international carriers flying in and out.
There is a reason why there is internationally agreed standard phraseology for radio communications.
Everyone learns MAYDAY/PAN and the associated expectations around it (e.g. radio silence etc. etc.)
Not everybody will be able to adequately follow along if you have a long drawn-out waffle discussion over the radio ... "we have a little problem" ... "do you want to declare?" ... "oh wait, standby ...." ...."oh, we're ok for now" ... "oh actually maybe this or that"... yada yada yada.
If its truly an emergency then cut the crap and use the standard phraseology and keep the communications terse.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQuHnrJu1I
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 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.
Edit: there might also be part of Ryanair culture that contributed, but that's speculation.
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/RYR3418/history/2025...
They had at least an extra hour of fuel, and they landed at the third airport they tried.
This is fairly common in GA and there are cases where it has happened in scheduled flights as well. That's why fuel sampling is common practice.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
And if you don't think the airlines would love to lobby Congress about the regulatory backstop, well . . .
The main reason why airlines would like to take the least amount of fuel is because it immediately increases payload capacity and thus flight efficiency. This being a cut-throat market there is a serious incentive to cut it as fine as possible. So the regulations around this particular issue are incredibly strict: you have to have a certain amount of fuel left upon landing, you have to write up truthfully how much you still had left and you will be investigated without fail if you cut into the reserve. The good thing about unions here is that they help to make sure that pilots know they are safe reporting truthfully because the airlines can not retaliate if they would pressure the pilot to not report an incident (which all pilots would normally definitely do). So they're a factor, but it is the regulator that writes the rules here and they are super strict about this.
And that's immediately why the calculation of the estimate becomes so important: you now have 30 minutes (or 45, depending) of deadweight + the deadweight for two alternates and an x amount of time in a holding pattern, plus up to three go-arounds. That really adds up, so you have to do your best to get the calculation as close as possible to what it will be in practice without ever cutting into that reserve.
It took me the better part of a year and massive amount of learning to write a small amount of code + associated tests to pass certification. It also taught me more about software engineering (as opposed to development) than anything I did up to that point in time and it made me very wary about our normal software development practices.
> I wonder if there would be any value in teaching an "engineering when lives are on the line" or "war stories from accident investigations" classes to new engineers.
There would be immense value in that. But who is going to pay for it? It's a course that will essentially cause your crew to start producing software at 1/10th the rate they would otherwise do.
Like, I'm definitively not an engineer, nor does my day job really involve engineering, yet my title contains Engineer! I'm a proud CRUD monkey and designer.
I have done engineering work previously when developing hardware, and it's really a different mindset (even in an agile & fast-moving engineering org). Safety, cost, reliability, multidisciplinary integration, etc. just don't really come up in a lot in web and app development (which is a wonderful thing, really—I love it!)
You'd think, but individual humans are very very bad at estimating risk, and in toxic group and work situations, humans will often take on increased personal risk rather than risk conflict. I.e., they will value group conformity over their own safety ... especially if their paycheck is involved. Fear of death is not nearly as powerful as robust regulation and unions.
It takes people with ideas and a willingness to put pressure in the right places to be sure that sane policies prevail.
I think it's pretty obvious that as time moves forward, we need to rely on "regulations" less. The root and history of the word in the political context is to make things regular. But state actions increasingly bring irregularity to the world.
It seems absolutely fair to say that, in this situation, the people - the pilots in particular, but also cabin crews, ATCs, engineers, and their unions, are the backstop worth observing and celebrating.
> It seems absolutely fair to say that, in this situation, the people - the pilots in particular, but also cabin crews, ATCs, engineers, and their unions, are the backstop worth observing and celebrating.
I will hold off on that conclusion until the report is in. There are so many possible root causes here that speculation is completely useless, and celebrations would be premature.
Of course the pilots are the backstop, and the unions are theirs, so they can make necessary calls the money doesn't like.
Same thing happens with Professional Engineers regardless of whether they are employed or work as independent consultants/firms. They’re legally responsible for the bridges and other infrastructure they sign off on with laws protecting them from employers and clients.
(I fully support the ALPA and other unions, I just don’t think it plays as significant a role in following regulations as you claim)
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.
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?
Low fuel happens, but this is (very) exceptional.
They landed safely, that is what is important. There is great cost to have extra fuel on board, you need enough, but it doesn't look to me like more was needed. Unless an investigation determines that this emergency would happen often on that route - even then it seems like they should have been told to land in France or someplace long before they got to their intended destination to discover landing was impossible.
6 minutes is way out of the comfort zone. They might not have made it in that case.
So I don't think 220kg is enough to do a go-around in a 737 (well, a go-around would've been initiated with a bit more than 220kg in the tank - they burned some taxing to the gate - but you get my point.) I've read around 2,300kg for takeoff and climb on a normal flight in a 737-8. A go-around is going to use close to that, it's a full power takeoff but a much shorter climb phase up to whatever procedure is set for the airport and then what ATC tells you.
I just flew 172s but even with those little things we were told, your reserve is never to be used.
These people came very, very close to a disaster. Fortunately they had as much luck left as they did fuel.
So yes they will do an "investigation". It's not a criminal investigation. It's to understand the circumstances, the choices, the procedures, and the execution that ended with a plane dangerously close to running out of fuel.
This will determine if there were mistakes made, or the reserve formula needs to be adjusted, or both.
Don't tell me about cost, just stop. Let MAGA-Air accept some plane deaths to have cheap fares.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=4d2256&lat=54.720&lon=-... is the track of this flight.
Went around at EDI at about 19:10Z, landed at about 19:51Z, so about a 41 minute flight.
0 minutes?
-1 minutes?
If you define X the amount of fuel you need after you land.
And you say that X needs to be enough to make an emergency landing.
And we define that the amount of fuel required for an emergency landing should cover the amount required for the landing operation while still having X in the tank when landed.
X > X + landing_cost
The plane already had made 3 failed attempt before and was redirected to two different airports.
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.
One of the challenges of aeronautics is the efficient disposition of the potential energy without converting it all into kinetic energy (ie speed) so that the landing happens at an optimally low speed - thus giving you a chance to brake and slow down at the end.
An electric fan aircraft absolutely can recharge it's batteries on descent. The fans simply act as turbines, creating drag to slow the aircraft and electricity to charge the batteries. Large commercial airliners already have a small turbine that works this way, the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) which is used to generate electrical power in emergencies.
RAT is only used when sh*t hits the fan. Even then, it can help you power some hydraulics / electrical, not “store” energy for further flight.
The OP asked - in a low fuel situation, can the energy spent on a climb get effectively recovered - and the answer is not really. We convert as much as we can into unpowered (low-powered) descent. But once you are at a spot where you make a final decision to land or not, you are by design low and slow - and all that energy you had 15m ago is gone.
If you need to keep flying, those engines need to spool back up. And that takes fuel.
Such aircraft do exist. For example, the Pipistrel Velis Electro trainer. And more recently, the Rhyxeon RX4E became the first electric aircraft to be type-certified for commercial passenger operations.
It's likely that we'll see many more electric fan aircraft in the coming years/decades, whether powered by batteries and/or hydrogen fuel cells, or hybrids with both conventional turbofan and electric propulsion in order to improve efficiency and environmental performance.
While it’s a real plane, I think we can both agree this is more of a prototype than what the general public would consider to be a passenger plane.
Yes, energy recovery is possible. It’s not happening currently in commercial aviation.
Isn't it when air hits the fan, technically?
(Sorry.)
Indeed, which is what the airplane would have done on its way down to land. So it's more like riding the brakes on your way down the hill, and now at the bottom when you realize you need to abort the landing, you are at low speed and it's quite an exercise to get back uphill to try again
But not because “you don’t get the energy back”. (As recursive suggested about a downhill bike ride which is the part i am disagreeing with.) You do get it back, but because you want to land you bleed it away to drag. And once it is bled away you don’t have it anymore.
So we don’t disagree about the practical implications for flying. I’m disagreeing with recursive’s particular statement about downhill cycling and what it implies about the physics of the problem.
If you coast all the way down the first part, you'll get about 20 feet up the other hill before you need to start pedaling. This is a direct analogy to "getting your energy back" by losing elevation.
But you don’t have to believe me. Look at the video of this glider doing an unlicensed airshow: https://youtu.be/QwK9wu8Cxeo?si=L-0Mfmu8wk1ZlQU7
It is a glider so it can’t “pedal”. You can see it steeply descending from 5:13 to 5:30 while it is speeding up and then the pilot picks up the nose and trades some of his speed for elevation again. And then he does it again around the 7 minutes mark.
You have two buckets of “water”. One bucket is kinetic energy and the other is potential energy. You can trade one for the other. You can also “lose” from the total volume of “water” due to drag (or friction in the case of the bike or roller coaster). Or you can add more “water” to your system by pedaling or thrusting with your engines. This is just simple physics 101. Also simple lived experience if you ever have the opportunity to fly an airplane.
1: https://pedalchile.com/blog/uphill
Yes, you get "some" back, and its not negligible amount. Typical modern airliner can descend on 15-20:1, giving you over 150-200km (90-120mi) range from typical cruising altitude of 33 000 feet even with engines off. Most everyday descents are actually done by maintaining altitude as long as possible, and then iddling the engines fully for as long as clearance allows. (Ofc you then use engines as you geat nearer, because its safer to be a little low when stabilizing on approach, than a little high)
Thanks to turbofans(edited from turboprops) better efficiency + less drag at higher altitude its actually more fuel economical to command full thrust and gain altitude quickly, than slower climb, or maintaining altitude (which goes against our intuition from cars, where if you wanna get far, you never give full throttle).
But theres still some drag, so you dont get everything back, so you generally want to avoid murking in low altitudes as long as possible. Full thrust repeatedly at lowest altitudes (from failed go arounds) is the least economical part of flight, so you want to avoid those if possible. But its true that the altitude you gain is equivalent to "banking" the energy, just not all of it.
Edit: changed turbofan into turbprop, which is what I meant.
(2) fuel burned stays burned, you don't 'get it back'
(3) the altitude gained may have been adjusted to account for the low fuel situation
(4) the winds are a major factor here, far larger than the fact that 'what goes up must come down', something that is already taken into account when computing the fuel reserve in the first place.
Actually, nothing in civil aviation that has a "jet engine" has used anything but a turbofan (or turboprop) since the early 70s with the exception of Concorde and some older business jets.
(Turboprops are jet engines, too, to be precise, with the jet of exhaust gases powering the propeller.)
They are certainly turbine engines, but I thought "jet" was reserved for those engines that propel the vehicle solely by their exhaust stream and bypass air. I am willing to be told I'm wrong, though.
It's not currently feasible to harvest it into fuel. It's (very very nearly) all lost to drag, on purpose.
A US gallon of Kerosene weights approx 6.5 lbs
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