David Learmount/LONDON
The UK Civil Aviation Authority's Safety Regulation Group (SRG) has slammed UK airlines' fuel planning methods following a study which revealed widescale suspect practices.
UK airlines' fuel planning methods are, at best, sloppy. At worst they put pressure on crews to carry less fuel than they should, says the report, which investigated the fuel planning practices of 14 unnamed UK airlines during high season operations last year.
The SRG study reveals that the airlines routinely ignore foreseeable events in calculating fuel requirements, and frequently used standardised computer calculations when specific ones should have been employed.
The SRG study was prompted by reports of suspect fuel planning practices to the Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting system (CHIRP). Despite the SRG warning to carriers about improving their fuel planning and "company culture" regarding perceived pressure on crews, new reports of poor practice and pressure on crews to upload fuel to minimums are reported in the current issue of CHIRP's journal Feedback.
One Feedback report says crews are told to calculate any additional fuel they believe a flight will require on the assumption that contingency fuel is there to be used. By definition, contingency fuel is for unforeseen circumstances.
Almost all routes require "alternate fuel" to be carried. This is to enable an aircraft to abandon its approach just before landing, carry out a missed approach or divert to a planned alternative destination, arriving with "final reserve fuel". But the SRG notes that, despite reminders, "too many aeroplanes continue to arrive in the vicinity of their planned destination with little more than alternate and final reserve fuel remaining".
The SRG concludes that airlines "applied their fuel policies in general accordance with JAR-OPS 1 requirements", but says that operators should correct "inaccuracies inherent in many computer generated pilot navigation logs; inadequate account taken of foreseeable events; and the manner in which flight crews interpret their company culture on fuel planning".
Source: Flight International
