Ever stuck your neck out too far? And got away with it?

"pacplyer" wrote in message
om...
"HiM" wrote ,snip

ONLY an idiot lifts a plane off the ground with a flight plan that will
run
him short of fuel
"HiM" wrote ,snip

HiM, I don't dispute how you state the obvious here. Common sense
says this guy Selwaykid is not a commercial pilot with his kind of
attitude.

But you are actually wrong about this. Polar flights out of Anchorage
with some operators use an FAA exemption to take off with inadequate
fuel for the real intended destination. It's called re-release. It
is perfectly legal, and standard practice to dept for instance: out of
Anchorage, Alaska to London Heathrow (LHR) with fuel that will
knowingly not get you there with FAR121 required int'l reserves.
Though somewhat controversial, this procedure makes the airline money
because they can haul more freight instead of gas. How it works is
that we file a fake flight plan with the FAA that lists Preswick,
Scotland as our destination and then at the computed "re-release"
waypoint the seven tanks on the 747 are totaled up by the flight
engineer and then the F/O compares this number say 107,500 lbs of fuel
to the min 105,300 lbs on the flight plan for re-release. Looking at
weather, the Captain makes his decision. We then are legal to call up
ATC and refile a new flight plan to what was really our intended
destination all along: LHR. If we have say only 104,000, it's now
"assholes and elbows" for us to pull out the new flight plans,
reprogram the three INS's, get more weather for Preswick, break out
and brief the new arrival charts and plates, and mentally prepare for
a long duty day (extra leg to get there.) Last time I did this was
summer 1989. In cruise the sun stayed up all day and all night (just
kind of wobbled around toward the horizon.)

pacplyer


i say again any captian who panders to company profit in such a way is far
less than professional