Grumman-581 wrote:
"AJ" wrote in message
ups.com...
My question is this: When should the pilot of a commercial jet dump his
fuel in flight? He obviously wasn't going to do that and was going
to land very heavy. Under what conditions is fuel dumping necessary?

Economics are rather important in fuel management for large aircraft... On
the one hand, carrying around that extra fuel when it is not necessary ends
up burning more fuel... On the other hand, it's quite possible that one
airport will have fuel at a price cheap enough that it is worthwhile to fuel
up there instead the endpoint of the next leg of the flight


Most airlines have matrix tables to compute the value of the cheaper
fuel vs. the increased fuel burn required to carry extra fuel (its not
free to carry extra fuel to 30,000 feet and then bring it back).
However, in this case, economics had nothing to do with it. The captain
was a training captain and did not fly the line very often. He was
upset that he was going to be late because he had already diverted. His
goal was to have a super fast turn around at his next (originally
planned) destination and then get back home ASAP. Part of his
motivation was probably to show the lowly line pilots how he was such a
super pilot and was able to avoid delays better than them, part of it
was that he didn't spend much time away from home and wanted to get
home. That also explains why he originally started his take off roll
w/o any clearance. Once the 1st officer mentioned it he stopped and got
his route clearance but then started his take off role w/o tower
clearance. He was in a mad hurry. Its also believed that because 99% of
all his take off and landings were in the simulator that the danger of
taking off w/o a clearance wasn't as intuitive to him. Trainingitis
they called it.

-Robert, CFII