"We decided to go back and because the situation was becoming urgent we opted to land overweight – we didn’t take time to do the dumping." "We took off from New York once and we had a medical issue on board that was becoming more serious by the minute," he said. In an emergency, however (as was the case with Flight 89), there might not be enough time to dump fuel, meaning the pilot will have to land overweight. It can take a while to lose all that kerosine: flight VS43 was in the air for several hours before it could land at Gatwick. Smith was forced to land at the nearest airport – Bangor in Maine, US – but not before dumping several thousand gallons of fuel. The world's safest - and least safe - airlines revealed “It wasn’t an emergency, but it meant we had no supplemental oxygen, so if there had been a depressurisation we wouldn’t have been able to breathe.” “About 20 years ago, when I was flying a cargo plane, the crew oxygen system failed,” he recalls. Smith himself has been in a situation where he had to jettison fuel. The pilot typically goes through a three or four step process to engage the plumbing and start dumping fuel. “It sounds terrible but one way or another that fuel is going into the atmosphere.”įuel is stored in the wings of a plane and is jettisoned from small nozzles also located in the wings. “Generally dumping happens at a high enough altitude for it to dissipate – it doesn't reach the ground in liquid form or come raining down on people,” says Smith. The solution, then? Dump fuel, which is exactly what the pilots of VS43 did, releasing thousands of gallons of kerosine over southern England before returning to Gatwick, where they landed safely. “This is the case for a few reasons, the obvious ones being that touching down puts higher stresses on an airframe than taking off, and heavy-weight landings require a very high touchdown speed, which makes stopping more problematic.” T - provide time for the crew to assess the situation, execute the dumping procedure and complete associated checklists - don’t press with non urgent matters.Flight VS34 landed safety after jettisoning fuel over southern England.S - support the flight by providing any information requested and necessary such as type of approach, runway length and any additional aerodrome details, etc.
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