Today I was flying LHR-MAN With an Airbus A321. I flew all the way to Manchester until I contacted tower (I had sufficient fuel, I had 5,000kg which was surely enough, even with IFATC I could’ve landed with 2-3000 kg of it.)
(No Approach yet) This was all ok. When there was Approach I contacted them and they sent me off to the other side of England. They obviously forgot about me (I’m not saying the controller) and once I turned they realized. They tuned me into another Approach and he vectored me like a normal plane, At this point, I Still didn’t have the Emerg. Requests so I put my callsign to LOWFUEL. Around Bradford, I got the feature so I decided to Request it. At 100kg Controller asked me to divert to the nearest airport (Which was Manchester). I tried going to EGNO but it was too late. I was at 0kg fuel.
The point of this thread is to ask IFATC to please be more aware of the aircraft, yes I know its a lot of aircraft but if you could check next time it would be amazing. Thanks.
(The turn was a decision made by me)
The low fuel option only appears after an certain amount of flight time, to prevent people from taking off with little fuel and abusing the request.
You should have diverted once you knew you were low on fuel. Not being able to request isn’t really an excuse here.
If you have a complaint, please message the controller directly. It’s possible your connection dropped shortly and you disappeared, in which case you would have appeared “off frequency” to the controller. Please contact them as they are the only one who can tell you what happened.
I thought that after a while they were going to ask me to go a different direction to potentionally help me land quicker. That was not the case here though. But I do feel for IFATC so I don’t think I will be filing a Complaint.
You dont need to complain to the controller, but everyone needs points to improve on. It is worth having the conversation to see what points you can both take from the event to prevent it in future.
I mean I do trust you, and also if It will help then I will have a little chat with approach controller, (I’ll have a little chat with the 1st controller, the 2nd one did a little more, but could’ve helped more.)
The controller was great! He was very busy with all those pilots and he managed us very professionally! I like approaches which takes 50 minutes of you flight time 😁
Heavy traffic is something a professional ATC group should train for. Why take the job if you can’t handle it? This should have never happened, sorry that it did.
In real world controllers only see the planes they control only a hand full not 100s of them. How can you even say I given too much trust in that way. What control does in FNF is amazing. No controller gonna do anything wrong purposely, the time you speak to them they only want to put you on the right place and hand you over. Its constantly looking for perfection job. So if you feel something happened just pm. It could be even for silly little fault of your own or their, I always had quick nice replys to have good convo. Keep this in mind they are volunteers. Be thank ful.
When you are planning your fuel, you need to be aware of how long you are prepared to hold for, and how much you need to divert to an alternate airport, that is planning on the pilots part. ATC don’t know exactly how much fuel you have and as you mentioned, it was ATC that called the diversion, with over 100 other inbounds to worry about. I think you’re expectation of others abit high…
Apparently IFATC know how much emergency fuel you have, and also I pre-packed around an hour extra of fuel. That is surely enough. This topic though is that I flew all the way to the other side of England.
No they can’t tell, they only know it’s low when you report it to them, but due to how long you were flying, the option came up way too late, an hour would of perhaps been enough if you diverted when you had 30 mins left, Newcastle probably would of been a good option, assuming you were on the east coast when had 30 mins left
