That "wonderful" pilot put every passenger on board in danger by not landing immediately when offered a closer airport. I wouldn't call that "cool, calm, and collected." In fact, I'd call it irresponsible and extremely dangerous.
I have to disagree because they didn’t take enough fuel because one go around and they diverge to YVR who is not far at all…..Gulf company put a lot of pressure on the crew to carry minimum fuel. It after God, captain decide so if he needs more, he takes more but not today.
Declaring a mayday because of a shortage of fuel owing to a missed approach and needing to divert to an alternate airport (similar to this incident) is catastrophic in my view. That procedure, I estimate, needs to be analyzed so that it doesn't happen again.
The videos keep getting better and better. I am sure that crew had a lot of explaining to do. As most of the readers who fly commercially know, the flight would be required to carry enough fuel to go missed approach at their primary destination and make an approach at the alternate with their reserves. They must have encountered bad winds aloft, it would have been informative to have the flight channel give a few more details. Very well done!
This is not so uncommon to happen as you might think, I bet they were carrying enough fuel but stuff like crosswind during the whole flight can significantly increase the fuel consumption
All of the Flight Channel videos are fabricated fantasy. None of it ever really happened. If things this horrific really happened they would be on every major news channel. Pure BS.
14.5hr flight in good conditions and all it takes is one diversion toward the end of the flight to get close to limits. Crew didn't do anything wrong. There are other long haul triple 7 flights that found themselves in same situation. Airlines are operating these birds at the edge.
What other long haul flights got into this situation? How many and when? Someone is responsible for shorting the fuel reserve. So you gain a small money benefit by "operating these birds at the edge" , but risk 375 lives and a $100 million airliner, plus your reputation? Not a smart gamble. The FAA has rules about this. The Boeing 777 is required to carry "trip fuel", "contingency fuel, 45 minutes worth", and "emergency fuel, 15 minutes worth".
@@chrisbishop4671 Here's more mathematics: Jet A fuel for airliners weighs almost seven pounds per gallon. If you top off the fuel tanks and fly a few thousand miles, you're carrying tons of extra fuel, wasting fuel to carry the weight. You may be too heavy to land. That's why sometimes the pilots have to dump fuel in an emergency.
Have you ever heard about MTOW maximum takeoff weight? Plane was full. If pilot sad: I need volunteer 30 passangers today to add extra fueyou and your family would be one of the 30?
It's always great when they can land without losing any souls. And they all stayed so calm and handled the mayday well. Thank you for another great presentation.
I believe i also saw this covered maybe 6-12 months ago by Kelsey on 74 Gear. As lame as it is to hit mayday fuel, i liked that the pilot was specific and asked for exactly what he wanted/needed.
The communication between the crew and the different controllers was a paragon of how these situations should be handled. The recording of these communications should be used as a training standard for both ATC and flight crew trainees. This was expertly handled by all involved.
That's strange, usually you should have final reserve after having in everything else calculated, missed approach, alternate, trip etc...how did he end up having only 30 minutes of fuel at ALT?
I'd like to know that, too. Even with strong winds on route, I'm sure they would have been able to see that final result (more or less) at their destination. BUT kudos to them for reporting Mayday right away, even if it means a lot of questions and paperwork in the end. At least there they were quick ^__^
@@bigbaddms And the plane was full to the max with pax and crew. Probably they had to calculate fuel so they wouldn't exceed maximum take off weight and it ended up being the bare minimum for flying to the alternate airport.
@iolandagirleanu9006 Well, I think they were below their minimum AND they knew that some time before when on route. In my opinion they should have chosen their alternate destination right away.
@@kreidefelsen With good weather at both the destination and the alternate, there would have been no reason to divert. They are not likely to have been able to know about the adverse wind shear happening at their destination in a timely manner by which to affect their choice where to land.
Great call by the pilots in declaring the emergency. Situation like that, you don't want to mince your words. There have been crashes because the pilots didn't express the urgency of low fuel situations. For those wondering, obviously the pilots plan for enough fuel to the destination airport plus the alternate and then some. My guess would be they hit a head wind during the trip so they burned more fuel than planned.
@@moizfarhat3513 Could have been unexpected headwinds, or altitude changes that were needed to comply with something, and thus a slightly less optimal fuel consumption, or even a small deviation around a storm mid route.
Some of you wondering why not extra fuel on this flight, well loading a flight with full fuel will be loss making for any airlines. That is why pilots calculate trip fuel and extra or contingency fuel according to the requirement of route, keeping in view passengers and baggage, en-route weather etc. Then the question is why they failed to carry less trip fuel for this flight. The answer is some times aircraft is going though a head wind which covers less ground and consume more fuel on every nautical mile or they face bad weather en-route and have circumnavigate bad clouds. Computer weather simulation can go wrong and give erroneous data, based on which the whole trip can go wrong. That is why regulations are enforced to use 1 hour of extra final fuel reserve, which is mandatory for every aircraft.
I enjoy your videos but this title is misleading. “Trapped in the sky”? They put in their alternate destination and landed safely. If they had nowhere to land due to the fuel situation, then yes, they would have been trapped.
This is some very good decision making. They gave the primary a shot and then diverted rather than getting fixated and running out of fuel as a consequence. The 30 minute margin seems rather tight but given their attempts to land in SEA and the strong winds they probably burned more fuel than expected.
What about LOT Polish Airlines emergency landing in 2011? It was such a great gearless landing, that it was nicknamed as "Miracle in Warsaw". The captain on this aircraft was 57 years old Tadeusz Wrona and First Officer was Jerzy Szwarc (51).
This is an outstanding video produced by The Flight Channel. The depiction of the Emirates trying to land at Seattle was over-the-moon! I enjoyed watching this without all the "Fluff"...it was simple and to the point! Thanks Flight Channel!!! ✈️ 😘 ☺️ 💓
Hah ha, I was sitting right next to the controllers working this.They were arrivals and I was departures. Emirates declared Mayday to get priority handling and they landed uneventfully. The system worked as intended.
@@PissedOffBanker They are legally required to declare a Mayday when they reach a certain fuel level. IIRC, this was put in place after the crash of Avianca Flight 052.
I’m giving the captain the benefit of the doubt and will say that the other airports that were closer than Vancouver were small and less equipped for emergencies. The amount of fuel each aircraft carries on every flight is determined by corporate guidelines and limits, not the captain. The captain knew what he was doing and he had much more situational awareness than any of us watching this video.
They literally say IN THIS AUDIO why they want to land at Vancouver. Do any of you, even after watching all these flight videos, understand how flying a commercial jet works? You don't just wing it into the airport and sort the landing once you get there. You pre-plan for a landing far enough in advance to adjust if things go wrong. Literally as the pilot monitoring is talking to the controller you can tell they're getting their approach for Vancouver set up. Why randomly change that if they're halfway done planning for the Vancouver landing and make the actual landing less planned and safe? It's up to their discretion and not the ATCs for a reason. While yours isn't egregious and I don't mean to go off on you, some of the comments here are bloody insane.
The captain ALWAYS has final say on how much fuel they take on. Yes there is corporate pressure to put certain amounts of fuel in but a captain can ignore that. Legally they must alwats have enough to get to an alternate airport but there's often nothing in reserve to be left in a holding pattern.
With a title like that I was expecting several landing attempts or airports keeping them waiting. It’s good there was no emergency irl, but makes for a bit of a non-story overall.
Great example of how it should be done. I just watched the story of Martin Air flight 495, a situation where the pilots should have diverted but did not, ultimately resulting in a crash that killed 56 people. Unhappy passengers and a load of paperwork are small prices to pay for making the decision to divert.
Kudos to the flight crew (and tower) for their calm, cool, professional handling of this. I can say with certainty that if I were in the crew seats I'd of been, "OH SH*T....We're gonna crash!" I'm grateful there are better people than me flying these planes.
Without the Mayday they have no priority to land. So they could be in a queue for an unknown length of time, which would eat further into the reserves. And if for any reason they had to go around then they would be in a very tricky position. Avianca flight 052 crashed with fuel starvation and had not clearly declared an emergency to ATC.
They would be mostly burned up in a go-around at low altitude. But I think they probably still had their legal minimum fuel in addition to the 30 mins which is not considered at all when declaring an emergency. Video doesn't say though.
For all those asking about why the low fuel, wasn't that a mistake etc.... the flight originated in Dubai UAE. Isn't this one of the extremely long, max endurance flights? nonstop from Dubai to Seattle? That's about a 14 hour flight or more isn't it? So wasn't the plane probably already fueled to max capacity, especially given the maximum passenger count too? What makes anyone think they didn't max out? This crew seemed super professional. Can any real experts chime in?
@bigbaddms 🤗 You want REAL experts 😮. Plenty of armchair experts in the comments (at least 80%) 🤦🏼♀️😂😂 Seriously, though, I understand what you mean . Of all the flight channels I have viewed, never have I seen so many inane comments. As a 76 yrs old granny I reckon I could just fit the 'real expert' you are requesting 😂😂
My question, perhaps it's been addressed earlier in the comments, is "Why is the flight still being referred to as Heavy?" I thought that designation was assigned if the plane exceeded a certain weight, with fuel factored in as a variable? Obviously (or not) the flight/plane was approaching minimums for weight if the tanks were near empty?
All 777s are always “heavy.” I think all widebody airplanes are. The main purpose of adding “heavy” is so smaller planes know to watch out for their wakes.
@@garycartwright4860 so you think otherwise.. fine but many pilots do this trick, to get priority.. lets face it, there was no emergency, just human errors.
@@metalgearsolidsnake6978 I don’t think otherwise I just find it a bit obsessive that you’ve put it on everyone’s comment. Ramming down people’s throats. Weird behaviour
The winds just a few thousand feet up could be very difference than those at the surface. Of course, it’s the surface winds that count and those were reported out of the SW gusting to 25kt. Not close to any limits by any stretch with Seattle’s N/S oriented runways. Close monitoring of fuel is necessary when destination weather is deteriorating. In this case an earlier decision to divert would have helped their fuel situation.
0:01 Intro 0:25 Approaching Seattle 1:17 Strong Winds 2:15 The Boeing 777 3:10 MAYDAY (Real Audio) 4:47 Descending Into Vancouver 6:00 Final Approach 7:20 Landing
My guess would be that the passengers were kept in an immigration holding area without being processed into Canada, then picked up by bus and driven to Seattle where they were processed into the United States.
Aerodrome? Also, in your text you have the tower saying that the plane had had one hour and 30 minutes of fuel. He said half an hour. Accuracy matters.
Aug. 31-At least 12 people were rushed to hospital on Sunday night after Philippine Airlines (PAL) flight PR113 encountered severe turbulence two hours before its arrival in Manila from Los Angeles.
It takes the video creators weeks to make these and they schedule/research them ahead of time. If they take your advice, it might be awhile before they get to it. Just letting you know, assuming it's even possible. Some (many?) flights don't have publicly accessible data to reference.
Mayday, we're out of fuel and need immediate landing. Would you like an immediate landing? Nah, we just want to be first in line at Vancouver. We're about to time out.
Good question. What happens if a passenger has a US visa but doesn't have a Canadian visa. What do they do with him/her? Does the passenger even get off the plane?
@@ed8907The can stay airside in the terminal. Actually Dubai airport has a hotel on airside in the terminal for people with long layovers so they don't need to apply for a UAE visa
I too am really enjoying and learning a lot with these videos... going through a midlife thing and regretting things I always wanted to try to do..i.e. fly a plane....I'm no longer buying that it's safer than driving a car.....oh well...at least I'm picking up on some of the jargon.maybe I'm ok passing on this one...
can you make a video about Jal flight 123 ? It is the most fatal disaster in Japan's aviation and has the most fatatlities in single aircraft crash in history. I want to know more how the pilots dealing with the plane when it losts its tail part and how the plane eventually crashed
Welp, I learned something new today. But is it possible the smaller airports before Vancouver would have had even shorter runways, which is why they didn't go there first?
@@briansmith4624 Right. I Googled that too but it isn't much closer than YVR and I'm assuming they chose that airport for maybe better access to fueling facilities.
ATC probably doesn’t know how much runway a 777 needs to land. He was trying to be helpful, but he’s not a pilot. It is Canada, though. Maybe 7000 feet is enough if you do a hockey stop? 🇨🇦
@@lebojay It would have taken longer to set up for those airports which are effectively the same distance to go. I flew airlines out of YVR for 30 years so I know. They and ATC did the right thing.
Seems kind of anticlimactic. Still, good to see something go wrong and ATC and the crew work together to get a plane safely on the ground with no apparent drama. No horrors in this video. Good work.
@@esteban1487 Yep. And there wasn't, which is awesome. It's nice to see happy endings here and there. I'm sure a lot of people would panic if they heard they were being diverted to a different airport. I know a few members of my family would. I can use this as an example of how a diversion doesn't mean we're going to crash or anything.
Thank goodness they were able to land safely, even though they were on fumes. This could have been such a catastrophe, but thankfully it wasn't. I wonder how come they ended up at bingo fuel so quickly. Don't the pilots usually plan for contingencies like this and bring extra fuel just in case? Maybe because of the winds at SEA-TAC, they ran out more quickly than they had anticipated. It's always a super episode when everyone lives! Been watching this channel for four or five years now, and it just keeps getting better and better! It is my favourite programme.
