Quote:
Originally Posted by shawty
Probably is the the one word you shouldnt use if you dont have the facts. There is probably a lot of things that shouldnt happen, but do.
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True, but it would have at least enough fuel on board to get to the divert airport and then some. The plane was on a domestic Berlin > Hamburg flight. Bremen, Lubeck, Hannover and Wolfsberg are hardly far away, each about 150 km or less which is about 15m flying time.
The plane was on a Hamburg > Munich hop [1], 775km [2] which for an A320 with a range of 6,800km and a fuel capacity of 29,840l [3] would mean that if all they had was the fuel to get to a diversionary airport the thing would have needed about 700l of fuel in the tanks, perhaps Hom3r can add but I would imagine that they had much much more than that in the tanks.
To expidite turnaround on the shorter flights carriers fill up less often and the additional cost of flying the weight around is offset by the ability to get an additional flight out of the plane over the course of a day.
So I did use the word probably, but I used it after putting some serious thought into it. Now if this had been an A320 in business config that had just arrived from New York my comments would have been different.
[1]
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles...urg-storm.html
[2]
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=e...93&ie=UTF8&z=6
[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A320#Specifications