Manchester Airport ran out of Fuel

[Ameecher]

I doubt many people even remember it already. There were 13 delayed flights and 17 others had to stop for fuel elsewhere. Hardly worth the bother of building a fail-proof system.

Its the reasons why It happed, I mean due to "lack of fuel" is not a good excuse from a nation like this!

My local petrol station sometimes has all the diesel pumps out or all the petrol pumps out of use due to a lack of the respective fuel. Doesn't stop me using it.

[John]

it would take 79 Tankers to move the amount of Fuel needed for the Airport. That is far too many Tankers to have as back up if they will only be used once every 50 Years.

Actually it's 79 tanker loads - and assuming the problem is with the pipeline and not the refinery, that's only a 60 mile round trip.

If you can only get hold of 5 tankers at short notice, you can still shift 20+ loads a day.


Having a backup doesn't mean having a fleet of tankers. A single pipeline is clearly a single point of failure that will cause massive disruption if it fails. It would take less than half a day in an office to create a viable back up plan - phone round the local oil firms to see who has what tankers capable of taking jet A, make a note of numbers and likely availability. Review every year or two.

Just because MAN have a pipeline doesn't mean all the smaller airports near it do. And they will have access to tankers.

The article suggests they had nothing in place, and just decided to ride it out. (Which, given journalism, could be entirely false).

This also happened mid week - with 12-24 hours notice (i.e. the amount of spare fuel they have at the airport), so getting hold of tankers shouldn't have been impossible...

Planning for failures doesn't mean spending huge sums of money - it just means having a vague clue of what your options so when the **** hits the fan you don't spend 10 hours running round flapping your hands...

[Pilot]

The Problem was at the refinery anyway

[orudge]

The fuel pipeline network datea from the 60s

Back them Manchester Airport was rather diffrent

But does that mean they're insufficient for present use?

The motorway network dates back to the 60s. While some have certainly been upgraded, there are several motorways that have really not changed much in the past 50+ years. Should we widen them all to 6 lanes each way just in case?

[GurraJG]

If not I wonder why it has worked rather well up to this point...

The pipelines didn't fail. If you'd bothered reading the article you'd have read that it was the refinery that stopped pumping fuel. The pipes didn't fail.

[GurraJG]

If not I wonder why it has worked rather well up to this point...

The pipelines didn't fail. If you'd bothered reading the article you'd have read that it was the refinery that stopped pumping fuel. The pipes didn't fail.

And why did the refinery stop pumping fuel? (Just to get thee facts correct!)

How about you read the articles at the beginning of the thread? If you'd read those, you'd have seen that the refinery stopped pumping fuel to the airport because of 'production issues'.

[buckethead]

'production issues'.

Get ready to explain them in detail in 3, 2, 1...