Saturday, September 05, 2015

After emergencies, airline fuel policy under scanner

Mumbai: Two incidents of aircraft declaring fuel emergencies on Thursday night and the diversion of 10 flights to Bengaluru have brought the fuel uplift policies of airlines into question.
On Thursday, a Jet Airways ATR (Madurai-Chennai flight) and an IndiGo Airbus A320 aircraft (Kolkata-Chennai) declared fuel emergencies, after being diverted to Bengaluru from Chennai due to runway closure. On the same night, an AirAsia Pune-Bengaluru flight was forced to land at the old HAL airport in Bengaluru (closed to regular airline movement since 2008) as reportedly, there was no room for parking at the Bengaluru airport. A total of 10 flights had been diverted from Chennai, owing to shortage of bays. The AirAsia flight did not declare a fuel emergency but could not be diverted to Chennai, as that airport was shut.
IndiGo said it was conducting an internal inquiry, adding the two pilots concerned had been taken off duty.
Last month, a Doha-Kochi Jet Airways flight landed at the Thiruvananthapuram airport with insufficient fuel.
DGCA regulations lay down the procedure for calculating the quantity of fuel required for each flight. These regulations are based on International Civil Aviation Organisation norms, according to which pilots are bound to declare a fuel emergency if an aircraft has fuel for only 30 minutes of flying time.
The regulations state the minimum fuel needed, while airlines periodically revise the flight fuel requirement. Jet Airways issues advisories to pilots on fuel uplift, based on fuel consumption on the route and past data on arrival delays. The flight commander is the final authority on the fuel quantity to be lifted for each flight.
05/09/15 Aneesh Phadnis/Business Standard
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