Ask the pilot

Here's one way to exploit people's fear of flying: Tell them airlines are saving money by skimping on fuel.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Airlines, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

iStockphoto / Brasil2

April 25, 2008 | MSNBC.com was responsible for a splashy and alarmist story last week accusing airlines of unsafe fuel practices. According to reporters Alex Johnson and Grant Stinchfield, flights are routinely being dispatched with reduced fuel loads, resulting in potentially dangerous situations when these flights are hit with delays and holding patterns.

It is true that carriers are, in some situations, cutting back on the carriage of extra fuel, which is heavy and therefore expensive to haul around. A fleetwide optimization helps them save money. Note that term: extra fuel.

We've been through this before, but here's a review:

Determining how much fuel will be carried on a given flight is a somewhat scientific undertaking, with hard-and-fast rules. Crews do not ballpark the load with a cursory glance at a gauge, as you might do in a car before a road trip. The numbers are wrangled backstage, so to speak, by an airline's dispatchers and flight planning staff. Intended routing and altitude are balanced against wind and weather conditions to formulate a minimum legal carriage. This amount cannot be arbitrarily reduced. The regulations get complicated, particularly on international routes, but a good place to start is with the U.S. domestic rule: You cannot take off without enough fuel to reach your intended destination, then proceed to the most distant of any required alternative airport (one or more might have to be designated, in accordance with forecast weather minimums), plus maintain a 45-minute cushion on top of that. Once under way, both the pilots and the dispatchers monitor the totals. The latter receive periodic updates via radio or automatic data-link transmission. Remaining fuel is compared with predetermined target values as the flight progresses.

Fly to your destination; fly to your alternative; and fly for an additional 45 minutes. You cannot -- cannot -- depart with less. Trust me, no airline that wants to remain in business asks its crews to do so. And if it did, no captain who wants to keep his or her license would agree. Payload permitting, however, you are welcome to depart with more than is legally needed. A fatter margin gives you greater flexibility, or holding time, in the event of unexpected delays. It's this above-and-beyond fuel that airlines are cutting back on, not regulatory fuel.

It stands to reason that more gas is better than less. It provides greater time to troubleshoot problems or to wait out airborne holds, postponing the need to divert. But while cutbacks allow less wiggle room, they are not dangerous. The penalty isn't crashing, it's having to divert earlier than you'd like, resulting in hassles for passengers and crew.

It's important to emphasize that although legal authority for a flight is shared between the captain and the dispatcher, if the captain is uncomfortable with the intended fuel load, he or she can request more. As the article accurately explains, dispatchers will sometimes challenge these requests. Dispatchers are trained and licensed professionals, and have every right to seek an explanation. It's part of their job.

"With all due respect, the captain does not have discretionary authority to add as much fuel as he would like for every flight," says a dispatcher with a major U.S. carrier. "At our company, crews can add up to a set amount without requiring a revised flight release. Beyond that, it needs to be a joint decision. My biggest gripe is when a captain calls for additional fuel before he has even driven to the airport, before having checked the weather or seen the paperwork yet!"

Having been employed at five different airlines over the past 18 years, I can assure you that the pilot-dispatcher relationship is rarely a hostile or confrontational one. Authors Johnson and Stinchfield draw from several anonymous reports that would seem to contradict this, but they are lacking context. Take it from somebody familiar with the politics and personalities typically found at airlines: These gripes are not as worrying as they sound on the surface.

"If I feel a crew is asking for an excessive amount of add fuel, I can document it in the shift log," says the dispatcher. "But I think I've only done that once."

At the end of the day, no captain will be penalized for desiring more fuel, and no crew will be forced to accept what it believes to be an insufficient amount. Meanwhile, criticizing carriers for not skimping on "extra" fuel seems at best a backward approach. If the existing protocols are truly inadequate, pilots and their unions can lobby the Federal Aviation Administration to change them. But as the vast majority of pilots will tell you, the guidelines are ample.

Different versions of this story pop up every now and then. Last November, ABC news came up with an even more egregious exposé. Reporters seized on the expression "minimum fuel," overheard in conversations between pilots and air traffic controllers. The term also comes up in the Johnson-Stinchfield report. "Minimum fuel" sounds scary to the layperson, but has a specific definition for crews. Basically, it means that a flight cannot accept further delay without burning into its reserves. It does not imply an emergency. (It can, however, be a burden for air traffic control, as pointed out in an April 17 Wall Street Journal report about an increased number of minimum-fuel incidents at Continental Airlines. Controllers are obliged to offer priority handling to aircraft in a minimum-fuel situation.)

Next page: Anytime the words "airlines" and "fuel" appear in the same story, people will pay attention