brunos

Ex-post, the situation is totally stupid. AF plane and its pax have been very lucky to "escape" unharmed. it is a totally different situation, but I still remember BA149 pax being taken captive during a stopover in Kuwait (and the ensuing BA bashing).
But even, ex-ante, one cannot help wonder how such a decision process might have taken place. Nothing unexpected happened. The fuel situation was known, the regulation of national airspaces were known; nothing unpredictable happened. Whatever the chain of decision, it sounds very unprofessional.
BTW, AF is currently flying to BEY normally.

Richelieu

Either they are being unfair, but it could be easily discovered and embarassing, or the French foreign ministry was simply not consulted about sending this plane to Damascus (and supposedly, divert the plane from BEY in the first place).

I can't fathom how AF could think the pax would prefer to be sent to Syria, and then get stranded in LCA for the night, incurring a very long delay, instead of being delayed for a few hours at most in the airport in Beyrouth.

I also notice that we're losing our FT vibes here. What is the proper compensation for being endangered and worried about a crash landing in the sea when everything is AF's fault?

You want to go where?

It is easy to question with the benefit of hindsight, the decision to divert from BEY. However, taking into account the likelihood of confused reports involving 'blockading' the airport, multiple hostage-taking incidents, etc., combined with junior government staff providing advice, I am willing to give AF the benefit of the doubt on this one.

But as others have said, the decision to divert to AMM, given the Syria situation, was a bad decision, which resulted in the diversion to DAM. For this, AF can and should be excoriated.

Goldorak

I'm sure that the choice of AMM over LCA for the diversion was driven by the fact that AF doesn't fly to LCA, while they do serve AMM and therefore have local staff and arrangements in place for catering, refueling, and eventually lodging pax.

Richelieu

According to Le Figaro :

They decided to land in AMM, didn't get a direct route, and had no other choice than to land in DAM.

BEY-LCA is 129 miles.
BEY-AMM is 148 miles.
BEY-DAM is 66 miles.
BEY-TLV is 130 miles.

I wonder how long they flew trying to get to AMM (and wasting fuel) before realizing DAM was only choice left and how little reserve fuel they load.

Edit :
According to AF, the plane was scheduled to land at 16:49, and landed in Damascus at 21:08 (since they left Damascus after a 2:20 stop). So they travelled for a little over 4 hours before landing in Damascus.

orbitmic

Note that all the recent reports (and AF's statement among others) do not mention which local ATC disallowed the use of a direct trajectory (it could be either Israel or Lebanon, or indeed Syria as all three countries could be flown over in some part depending on where exactly the plane was when it asked for authorisation. What is hard to understand to me is that necessity of flying the most direct route to AMM. Even factoring in the fact that they presumably first went round in circles for a while, any detour would only take a few dozen miles and it seems quite incredible that the flight would not have enough spare fuel to do that. In fact, even the fact that they absolutely needed to refuel in DAM sounds odd to me. I think that an A320 or an A321 have a flight range of about 3000 miles and CDG-BEY is under 2000 so I really wonder if the tank wasn't full in the first place?

You want to go where?

My understanding is that they don't fuel planes the way we fuel cars. You put in enough fuel to get where you are going +extra for insurance - you don't just fill the tank up. Fuel is heavy and you burn more fuel carrying extra that you don't need.

q

After reading yesterdays statement from Air France, it would seem that the AFR "insisted" that they go to Amman instead of Larnaca ("led the Company to decide, together with the Captain [...]"). Perhaps quite some time was spent trying to make that work out.

terminalfive

Exactly

You have to add fuel to carry extra fuel

Fuel weighs and the lighter the a/c the less fuel you consume

Very interesting thread this - as others have pointed out it's easy to be the "Monday morning quaterback" but it does APPEAR that a series of mistakes were made

brunos

The flight departed around 17:49 (BEY time) and was scheduled to land around 21:45 in BEY. Instead, it landed around 22:00 (BEY time) in DAM, according to the AF source quoted:
http://corporate.airfrance.com/en/pr...-paris-beirut/
If there is no error in AF release, that means that the aircraft landed in DAM at approximately the time it was supposed to land in BEY. Hard to believe that they had loaded so little extra fuel that required such emergency refuel in a very risky place. And as Richelieu pointed out, there are numerous alternative airports within 200 miles.

I doubt that we will ever hear the full story. If some sources are correct, the French Ambassador to Lebanon as well as several VIPs (Syrian and others) were onboard. Remember that Fabius, The French Foreign Minister, was visiting Syria's neighbors at the time:
http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Laurent...o-visit-Jordan

terminalfive

Very interesting. If those timings are correct does seem very very strange that this decision was taken

San Gottardo

These numbers are for a direct line "as the crow flies" but do not at all correspond to the distance the plane has to travel. Whereas BEY-LCA can be flown more or less directly, the route to Damascus goes over the Mediterranean on a Northern heading along the Lebanese and Syrian coast to Latakia, then turning right over Syria proper, South to Damascus, and - if relevant - onto Amman. So Amman and Damascus are much further than Larnaca, and further than the numbers you quote may make believe.

No, the tanks were certainly not full when leaving Paris. The amount of fuel is calculated the following way:

Taxi fuel (=needed to taxi at departure airport)
+ Trip fuel (=needed to reach planned destination, in this case Beirut)
+ Contingency fuel (=what the captain believes could be needed on the trip, for instance for flying some weather-related detours, or for flying at non-optimal altitudes which consumes more fuel)
+ Alternate fuel (=in this case, fuel to reach either AMM or LCA)
+ Final reserve fuel (=enough fuel to fly holding patterns at 1500 ft AGL for 30 minutes). This is a legal minimum which has to be in the tanks when landing. Below that level, MAYDAY has to be declared

The Captain or the airline may decide to put extra fuel for other reasons.

No idea, my reckoning is that for CDG-BEY a B777 would have about 40 tons of fuel at take-off.

What I am trying to figure out is taking the above equation on which portion they have used up the fuel. My hypothesis is that they have spent some time holding over Beirut deciding what to do, thus using up some of the final reserve fuel. So they had enough alternate fuel, but would have reached Amman without the final reserve and therefore decided to land in Damascus. But here's the tricky question: given that they had used a large portion or all of their final reserve fuel above Beirut, they should have realised already during that holding pattern that they could reach Amman only if they received a "shortcut", which they ended up not getting. Since there was uncertainty about getting the shortcut and not getting it meant landing in Damascus, the wiser decision would have been to abandon the Amman idea altogether and to go to Larnaca. But this is only a hypothesis, which cannot be affirmed without knowing how much fuel they had at takeoff, used during the trip, how long they were holding above Beirut, and how much flight time was required to reach Amman.

I have a hunch that one concern of Air France's operating center back in Paris was that the crew would not be able to reach its crew hotel which is several kilometers from the airport.

---

Some more details, after having spoken today to some people who were on that flight:

• They Captain had made an announcement that they were going to land in Damascus and said that everything was prepared and safe. Most pax stayed calm, with only a few people getting nervous and standing up "we can't go to Damascus, it's too dangerous'. The cabin crew calmed them down
• Another announcement explained to pax that there might be a problem to pay for the fuel and the crew was entitled to ask pax for cash, they'd be reimbursed at the next destination. The reason that the money collecting was limited to the first couple of rows was that they had come up with EUR 17'000 very quickly (this flight is full of people who travel with large wades of cash in their pockets, don't ask where it comes from ;-) )
• The story with landing in the sea was a little unclear. I thought until today that it was complete bogus. But indeed what had really happened that some passengers in the bulkhead seats (the one I spoke to was sitting in the second Affaires cabin's first row) were asked "to hold back all passengers until the slides were fully deployed". What I did not really get from their explanations was where this happened and why. Was it really in preparation for a landing on water? Or for a possible "crash landing" because of not enough fuel? Did the crew really consider it? The pax couldn't tell
• The crew were somewhat nervous, three apparently had to throw up, but were very nice with passengers
• In Damascus the window blinds had to be lowered. There were some moments without a lot of information and some pax thought that they were actually held hostage
• In Larnaca people were put on buses but without information of where they were heading to. It turned out that they were going to the Hilton in Nicosia, about one hour's drive away from the airport. They arrived at the hotel at 4am. Prior to that they were told that the plane would depart at "11 o'clock Zulu" and to be ready by "8am Zulu for breakfast" - noone knew what Zulu time was, and so people just slept four hours. A lot of confusion, no information and noone from Air France in Cyprus

brunos

Thanks San Gottardo for the interesting explanations.

The AF pres release mentions an A330 not an A320 or B777. But it is probably irrelevant.

I am not sure that the "holding pattern over BEY" is likely. II is hard to figure out a holding pattern when the plane arrived in DAM at 22:12, while expected to arrive at 21:45 in BEY.

I understand that a direct route is usually not possible, but there are quite a few airports that were not far even with an indirect route. So the additional fuel must have been minimal and probably wrongly computed as additional fuel (wetherr alternate, contingency or some other) should take into account restricted flying zones. A Dutch pilot who was my golf partner believes that this whole story is unbelievable for a flight that took off rapidly (no taxying delay whatsoever) and was not into any weather or other diversion. Cannot understand why the plane could not fly another 3 or 400 miles.

To stick with my James Bond story (I am currently watching "You only live twice"), maybe they had to unload some Syrian spies

San Gottardo

Watching the same movie on "France 4"

ETA into Beirut was 21h25. So it is possible that around 21h15 they started considering alternatives, and around 21h45 decided to go to AMM. When they didn't get the shortcut they realized that they didn't have enough fuel to actually go there. But still I don't know where all that fuel went.

As said earlier, most elements would have been merely inconvenient (deciding not to land in BEY, asking pax for cash, communicating awkward departure times for leaving Larnaca), but the Captain misjudging his fuel situation and routing options and eventually being forced to land in a civil war country that is openly hostile to France doesn't make him look good.

brunos

Same during my holiday. Only watched it six times allready.

if the French ambassador was onboard and Fabius nearby, it is likely that some lbureaucrat at the Foreign Affairs ministry added his pinch of salt making real-time decisions difficult.