United Airlines lands in BNE due to low fuel

[Daniel F]

http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/united-airlines-flight-forced-to-land-due-to-low-fuel/story-e6frfq80-1225820344788

Looks like todays UA flight from LAX diverted to BNE due to low fuel.

I love the picture in story in the link above... they must have had a lead block in the fuel tanks to cause the plane to do that!

[Sarah C]

That picture is very misleading. Unless you read the full bi-line of the story on the front page, you would thing that is the aircraft in question.

I know news.com.au make mistakes like this regularly (not just aviation stories) but they seem to have a standard "tail" image for most of the local airlines in thier library. Surely they could have one for one of the worlds biggest carriers as well? :confused:

[Jason H]

A United Airlines was plane forced to land in Brisbane / AP file

They can't even get their grammar correct, let alone the actual facts :D

[Geoff W]

The Age has this headline....

http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/flight-forced-down-in-brisbane-20100116-md3h.html


Forced down. hello!

Kind regards,

Geoff

[Adam G]

Send it into Media Watch - they love stuff like that.

Seems strange for a fuel diversion that they ferried a second B744 into BNE to take the pax down to SYD - anyone know the story there?

Did the diverted aircraft land with a non-MEL item or something?

[Jamie D]

This made me laugh as much as on Channel 10 the other night they were doing a story on the melbourne trains buckling in the heat and how many stuff ups the rail service had and when they went to the story thy couldnt get audio.... and they went back to Mel Waldon who said "they were having some technical difficulties" WAS SO FUNNY!

[lloyd fox]

Well the aircraft in question was N127UA which also diverted into BNE mid week as well.It was operating UA 839 today .United sent up N107UA to pick up the pax and take them back to Sydney.N107UA operated UA 863 SFO-SYD then onto BNE.There was no SYD-MEL-SYD today as this aircraft operated SYD-BNE-SYD.

I am not sure if N127UA has departed BNE as yet ??

[Geoff W]

Adam,

I am unsure if your comment was meant to my post or earlier ones.

In my case, I would'nt give media watch such easy fun. I like our interests more than media, I just put up here, what I think is crazy.

Lloyd,

My observations from earlier in the day indicated with the SYD-BNE-SYD shuttle?

As you mentioned there was no SYD-MEL-SYD today.

UA have recovered the day OK.

The eastbound LAX flight has left a couple of hours late. Not to bad.

I am ASSUMING, there wasnt a spare UA aircraft hanging around in SYD.

Very happy to be corrected.

Kind regards,

Geoff

[Adam G]

I am not sure if N127UA has departed BNE as yet ??

Apparently N127UA is parked at the old intl terminal awaiting some engineering attention.

I think this aircrafts diversion earlier in the week was a SFO/SYD flight.

[Mark B]

I heard this morning it was still there. Sounds like the tech issue is a bit non trivial if this is the case.

[Gerard M]

Seems its now passing HNL at FL410 as UA9939 from YBBN-KLAX

[D Chan]

it's not the first time this has happened to UA and certainly won't be the last... but what's surprising is that some in the media are beginning to report minor things like these and blowing them out of proportion unnecessarily. This event is not even newsworthy.

when will see start to see reporting such as .. "a bus broke down today" or "a train service was cancelled today"... the natural question people would ask is "how does that affect me, and why do I need to know".

Attention grabbing headlines on a slow news day tsk tsk. :rolleyes:

whats missing in the article is the typical media <insert here> line "this event is yet another serious safety incident for the <insert airline> which has been plagued with mechanical problems". "Earlier this year one of the airline's aircraft had a system malfunction resulting in the 24 hour delay of a flight". "An airline spokesperson has stated that the two incidents were not related". If the journos had done their researches properly they wouldve found out about the UA A320 landing gear problem at Newark. Yet they ALWAYS recycle old incidents for every new Qantas incident....

[Daniel F]

How is this not newsworthy? How many flights have to be diverted due to low fuel each day? Probably none (unless its weather related). And if it was just a minor problem, will didn't they just top up the tank and fly down to Sydney?

[James Smith]

I would say because the crew was out of hours. United used the crew that would have done the Melbourne leg of UA839 to fly to Brisbane to pick up the passengers. Had this not happened the story would have been more juicy for the media - 300+ stranded passengers etc.

[Daniel F]

If its a crew hour issue, wouldn't it have been easier to fly the crew that operated the flight up to BNE on QF or DJ and fly the UA aircraft back to Sydney to operate that afternoon's SFO flight?

[D Chan]

How is this not newsworthy? How many flights have to be diverted due to low fuel each day? Probably none (unless its weather related). And if it was just a minor problem, will didn't they just top up the tank and fly down to Sydney?

Just because you haven't heard about it before doesn't mean it hasn't happened before and I can confirm with you that it has happened before because I've seen it whilst I was working for a ground handler that handled UA. If it has happened before and wasn't reported in the media back then then why is this 'news' any more worthy of being reported?

The media reported 'low fuel'. Well if it was really a 'low fuel' incident, and one that actually matters which is fuel starvation of course it's worthy. But the reality is that it is not a 'low fuel' incident because if it were the ATSB would have investigated. In all likelihood the flight probably made it into BNE easily. Based on this - should the media begin reporting every single diversion that takes place? And why did they report this 'diversion' as a 'low fuel' incident when it wasn't one? In fact if you read most of the article you would have realised it wasn't at all a serious incident that the headlines made it to be, and this basically was a non-event, besides the fact it was a standard diversion.

I have said this once and will say this again - this is yet another classic piece of utter unprofessional news reporting.