Virgin flight declares emergency after fog diversion

[Adrian B]

From The Age

Source

A passenger plane has been forced to make an emergency landing in regional Victoria.

The Virgin Australia plane, which was travelling from Brisbane to Adelaide, landed safely at Mildura on Tuesday morning.

Mildura Airport CEO Bill Burke said the plane, and a separate Qantas flight, had been diverted to Mildura because of heavy fog.

However, the fog rolled in across Mildura too, making landing difficult.

Mr Burke said the Virgin flight had to pull out of two attempted landings, and ran low on fuel in the process.

He said the plane declared an emergency, but was able to land safely and all 85 passengers and six crew safely disembarked.

The spokesman said the Virgin pilot had received ''some information over the radio'' from a Qantas pilot who had landed a plane on the Mildura runway minutes before the Virgin 737 made its landing.

[Mick F]

Sometimes, you just get caught out from shear bad luck! Have had it myself.

I'm sure there are plenty out there, that will testify to the occasional BOM stuff up resulting in unforecast weather.

Mick

[Rowan McKeever]

VA1384 BNEADL & QF735 SYDADL both diverted to MQL today. QF735 continued to ADL arriving at 1204L, the VA aircraft seems to be heading back to BNE. Both were B738s

[Daniel M]

Interesting to hear on the 5pm news, 2 different people on board who were interviewed, mentioning that cabin crew told them to assume brace positions on landing in MQL and were yelling "stay low, brace".

Perhaps cabin crew taking the flight crews information of an "emergency landing" a bit too literally, with little other information ?

[Stuart Trevena]

Hi All,

Why was the VA low on Fuel in the First place?
Did someone forget to add extra fuel in case of a Diversion?
Or is this just a case of VA running their aircraft with bare min fuel?

They should have had enough fuel to get to Melbourne.

Stuart

[Mick F]

Stuart,
Without getting too technical, basically they would only have required fuel to an alternate airport that was suitable. I'm guessing that at the time of planning and even right up to the execution of the diversion, Mildura was suitable weather wise.

From what I can gather, Mildura then suffered unforecast fog which put the crew in an unfortunate position. Nothing of their own wrong doing from what I can gather. I've found myself in a similar situation before. The BOM doesn't always get it right.

Mick

[Mick F]

And something else to consider. Carrying around tons of extra fuel for 'just in case' is not feasible. When you're talking aircraft the size of a 737, it is burning more fuel to carry that extra fuel.

Mick

[Philip Argy]

Just out of curiosity, had Mildura been fogged in by the time they did the second GA, where might they then have landed given their fuel position?

[Rowan McKeever]

Didn't they also make 2 attempts at ADL before diverting? Flightaware certainly showed both the VA & the QF made it all the way to ADL before heading back to MQL, but can't recall what the patterns over ADL looked like.

In any case, they may have chosen MQL as alternate over MEL because MEL was requiring holding fuel, they may already have been sending aircraft to MEL from othe fogbound airports like CBR, any number of reasons. The regs only say they must have trip fuel plus a certain number of unsuccessful approaches plus diversion fuel. Any more than that & quite likely you're offloading pax or cargo... do that on enough flights & your financials are gonna get real ugly real quick...

I dare say plan c was MQL as I doubt they had fuel to get anywhere else that can take a B737. WGA probably closest, maybe ABX?

[Mick F]

Never heard of 'unsuccessful approaches' fuel. That a new one is it?

Excluding any company operations manual requirements, the regs state that the fuel onboard is required to be made up of:
Fixed Reserve
Taxi Fuel
Flight Fuel
Variable Reserve (normally 10% I think it is, of the flight fuel. Few years since I've needed to worry about that)
Any holding fuel required for either traffic, weather, any other holding requirement
Alternate fuel where required, plus any relevant holding fuel at the alternate

By no means an expert in this area, but I dare say the alternate was selected even before the aircraft took off from Brisbane.

Mick