A confusing plane diversion
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- Опубликовано: 18 сен 2024
- Jack Chesher, Corry Will and Luke Cutforth discuss a question about a roundabout creation of an averted aircraft.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Jack Chesher: @livinglondonhistory, / livinglondonhis
Corry Will: @SciGuys, / notcorry
Luke Cutforth: @SciGuys, / lukecutforth
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023.
One thing they didn't touch on is "Why Glasgow?" The great circle route from Newcastle to Cancun starts out to the northwest, so Glasgow is pretty close to directly in the path of the ideal route.
Yes they did. Glasgow's runway is long enough to do direct 787 flights to Cancun. Since the weather was low pressure in Newcastle, they were ordered to fill up with the minimum amount of fuel to make it to Glasgow and then land, refuel then go to Cancun by ATC rout plan changes.
@@matthewjbauer1990jello is saying why they picked Glasgow rather than any other airport with a sufficiently long runway
They probably needed to refuel at Prestwick, south west of Glasgow, rather that the main Glasgow airport. Prestwick airport runway is so big it was as alternate emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle.
Oh wow, incredible !
I am also immediately thinking about fuel. If I am right is yet to be determined.
Yep I immediately thought of fuel because of how cagey he was being about "weatther". Everyone thinks storm but I figured it could be those massive heat waves UK and EU had recently. Pilots need to properly recalculate their v1/vref/v2 when flying off of hot tarmac during a heat wave and it could have been that they figured they simply couldn't take off with enough fuel because of how hot the air was. They need to do this is many middle eastern hubs which is why they have ridiculously long runways facing the sea and flights are scheduled early in the day or in the evening.
Ah yes, the most famous "Flying Brick"
It's only like 3-400 meters longer than the main Glasgow airport, and it's still pretty short compared to other commercial runways that are 50% larger at the same elevation
How horrible must a place be for Tom Scott of all people to talk about them like this ?
In some videos Tom has leaned into city rivalries with trash talk.
"Horrible"? You mean "great"?
He went to Slough. He still has flashbacks from it.
@@robertjarman3703you gotta make it sound more miserable than that. Sloooouuuuuugh. 😢
He's wrapping upp his channel, so he can afford to make people angry now.
I love Tom's idea about a Catholic pilgrimage to Cancún
A similar thing applied to the QANTAS A380 flights from Melbourne to LA. They had to restrict passenger numbers and baggage allowance because if the plane was both fully loaded and fully fuelled it would be above its maximum take of weight.
Someone from Newcastle needs to challenge Tom to return to film a good video there that will get him to say happier things about the city!
Why? His description of the Bigg Market is being polite especially at 1am, and I'm from Newcastle!
He could show us the castle there! I hear it's new. :P
My first idea was of a flight between Newcastle (Uk) with a expected fill-up at Newcastle somewhere in the US or Canada redirected on a Glasgow (either Canadian or US) because the weather in the "overseas" Newcastle was bad.
Similar here: My first guess was that it was Newcastle-under-Lyme rather than Newcastle-on-Tyne that had bad weather, so the plane could take off but needed to travel north.
@@deryckchan The flight route wouldn't go anywhere near Newcastle-under-Lyme. Remember that a straight line on the Mercator Projection isn't the shortest path on a globe.
Ah yes, the famous New Newcastle
Alternative title: Tom dunks on Newcastle for 6 minutes, 42 seconds
It's not much of a diversion, you generally fly the same route down the Eastern Seaboard of the USA anyway.
1) 4,803 miles direct vs
2) 4,850 miles if via Prestwick (+47 miles) or
3) 4,856 miles if via Glasgow (+53 miles).
Yes, they were thinking of a mercator style map projection, and not of the great circle route. Even a typical flight from London to Miami probably first flies to the northwest. And you would probably fly a nearly identical route if going to Cancun.
I've done that flight from Newcastle to Cancun.
It wasn't full of people from Newcastle because for intercontinental flights people may travel quite a long way to/from airports.
I'm not from Newcastle and wasn't going to Cancun. It was the best combination of price and date for the biggest leg of my journey.
Also, it's about 11 hours and you had to be st the airport for about 5am so everyone was just glum and bored.
Also Tom, "no de-icing equipment". Newcastle is big enough to have long haul flights and even my tiny local airport that only does relatively short flights has de-icing equipment.
I had a similar real life experience so was able to guess this a little before Tom did. I was at a small airport in NW Florida, and they had run low on fuel and were rationing it, so we got enough gas to go over to New Orleans, fill up and then proceed to our original destination of Chicago. This requires much paperwork with the FAA with manifests and so forth, so it made my connection window incredibly tight.
To fly to Cancun from Newcastle, the shortest route across the globe is to go (ever so slightly) north for a while before heading south
And do you know why we dont tend to fly flights just over the poles? Its the ice walls... No obvs not
Its the fact that a plane flyin the usual route over the atlantic can safely reach an airport in most emergencies either somewhere in europe, america, or greenland. When flyin over the poles, theres a lot longer to go to get to a safe airport to land at in the event an engine breaks down durin the flight
Shortest pt isnt all that matters for flight travel
They're not suggesting to fly over the north pole, though? It's just that, due to the Earth being a sphere, the shortest path between two points isn't always a straight line, and in this case the shortest path is such that you end up going ever so slightly north of Ireland, instead of cutting right through it like you would with a straight line.
@@gudf4486 It is a straight line, it just doesn't appear that way on a Mercator projection, but it will on a globe. The plane flies straight, but the compass heading changes throughout the flight as you circle the globe.
@@comicus01 It's not a straight line though, as that would mean tunneling all through the liquid magma deep under the Earth's crust.
Wow! I was sure the plane was diverted from Newcastle upon Tyne due to bad weather over Newcastle, Northern Ireland! Not that obvious I guess!
The Newcastle hate from Tom is lovely
The now closed Plymouth Airport used to have to do the same thing- but all of the time! My flight from Plymouth to Gatwick diverted via Newquay to fill up, which is entirely in the wrong direction- no wonder it closed!
I used to love doing the United Airlines trips from Washington Dulles to Saint Thomas, then to San Juan, Puerto Rico to Chicago. The Saint Thomas to San Juan was about an 8 minute flight with very few passengers disembarking, but was for this exact same reason.
You just tell the passengers the plane is doing Pre-Drinks in Newcastle
Well, now we know at least one person who'll never be honored with the Freedom of the City of Newcastle. 😁
The Bigg Market is certainly an experience. 50% of the doorways lead you to places to buy cheap alcohol; the other 50% to places to buy cheap greasy fast food for soaking up the cheap alcohol.
I used to walk past Bigg Market six nights a week on my way home from work about 2300. Half the time, there was a fight in progress, and every time, there was at least one person lying drunk on the pavement or the road.
If my only experience of Newcastle was the bigg market I would probably be the same as Tom,
the pilgrimage from the holy city of Newcastle to the miracle site of Cancún 😅
I went through Gateshead in the daytime, and it was pleasant enough, but I think it would be cool to turn up at one Newcastle with a booking to the other: "It says you are going to Newcastle, but this is Newcastle." Triple checking codes while booking would be necessary. When I looked it via somewhere like DOH(A) with the transfer between big and small aircraft for the Aussie one, NTL at either BNE or MEL
most likely would be BNE
@@nelsondawson9706 Both are options, depending on availability. The suprise is that Melbourne is 300 km closer to Dubai or Doha than Brisbane, due to MEL being well west of BNE. Brisbane and Gold Coast people hate that rural opposition (it fades the curtains, apparently 🤪) means no daylight saving, meaning pre 5 am sunrise.
*Spoiler warning*
My guess before watching: the aircraft may somehow be performance limited due to weather (especially given that Newcastle has a relatively short runway) so the aircraft’s takeoff weight would have been too high to takeoff from there if it had enough fuel to get to Cancun. If this is the case then it would have to takeoff with less fuel to reduce weight and refuel in Glasgow
not only are you spot on but you also helped me understand it cause they didn't explain it well enough
That was my guess partway through, too! For those who don't know, low pressure means that the engines need more time - and thus runway length - to get to full power, and the speed depends on the weight as well. For a transatlantic flight like this on a 787, my quick (and probably wrong) guess is that about 80 or so tons of fuel would be needed, whereas a shorter flight to Glasgow would only need about like 10 tons (where they can then uplift the required fuel).
@@sirgarberto Worth rememberin that when it comes to transportin rly big stuff, esp moreso when also goin a long distance; the fuel weight is often the thing that has the biggest impact
This is seen best in probs its most extreme example when it comes to spaceflight, but airflight has similar restrictions. Even ships flyin across the top of the ocean are significantly hvier bcuz of the immense amount of fuel needed for such a journey
When it comes to personal transport its a nonfactor for the most part and affects speeds by fractions of a kph when you compare fully fueled to barely fueled, so we as individuals dont tend to think about how much that weight of the fuel can add up, and exponentially fast as well.
Bcuz exponentially higher than 0.2kph diffs for most cars is only like 0.8kph diffs for the hviest cars... Or still so negligible that a full tank that gets like 10 km to the gallon will now get 9.8 km to the gallon; oh noes (numbers just for easy comparison of the size of diff, not based on any actual car mileage)
But keep multiplyin that diff by itself enuf to reach the size diff of a plane thats meant to carry hundreds of ppl and their luggage; and that becomes a huge diff, to the pt where you absolutely do not wanna bring any more fuel than you need...
Which results in potential catastrophes caused by underfuelin, which is why theres regulations about requirin intentionally overfuelin to compensate for any potential issues that foreseeably cud arise. Cuz savin the airport $50 on each flight isnt worth riskin hundreds of lives.
@@SylviaRustyFae yeah, no, that's not what confused me. It's just that Tom went straight to "short runway -> less fuel" and everyone agreed without any explanation; I knew fuel weight is a consideration but not what it had to do with short runways at all, especially when in normal conditions they can lift off just fine. It wasn't until I read the comment that it made sense.
I'm not sure Glasgow is the wrong way from Newcastle to go to Cancun.
a) Planes follow air corridors rather than straight from a to b, unlike crows (citation needed).
b) The world's a globe. Lots of flights go "over the top". When I was on that flight I think we arced over and then flew down the east coast of the continental USA rather than straight across the Atlantic like you'd assume from a flat map.
Your intuition is correct. A great circle route between Newcastle Upon Tyne to Cancun leaves going WNW, and passes about 30 miles from Glasgow. But they cut the corner on that and only add about 10 miles to the total journey.
Oh my god, it's wonderful seeing all these great minds work together
It happened about a week after a TUI flight returning to Newcastle Airport from Tunisia was diverted to Manchester due to “unfavourable” weather conditions.
It's not that much of a diversion. Due to the curvature of the earth, the direct route from Newcastle to Cancun takes off going slightly north, not south.
I was on a flight delayed for mechanical problems in Newark (one [of] the NYC airports) on its way to the Dominican Republic. They gave a better explanation in English than they did in Spanish for the delay.
To quote the Technical Difficulties
**"TAX HAVEN...WIDER THAN A MILE"**
Tom Scott is to Newcastle as Garth Marenghi is to Scotland
Geordie bredrin... ASSEMBLE!
...the wheel spins and lands on Newcastle.
I thought the weather was so bad that the workers who fueled the plane couldn't be outside due to union reasons.
I was thinking fuel, but just that - being a tiny airport - Newcastle simply wouldn't have had enough fuel on hand to juice the 787 up appropriately. I think that's close enough to count as a pass, surely?
Why does a longer runway mean that you can bring more fuel on-board?
The plane needs to be able to reach a higher initial speed to takeoff with more fuel, bcuz heavier, and it cannot reach such a speed on a shorter runway
Fuel is a huge factor in the weight of a plane bcuz it takes so much fuel to burn those engines for so long, which is also why planes prty much nvr fuel up to full capacity... Instd fuelin to a bit over the amount needed to complete any given route; not much over, but enuf over to allow for diversions (or also losses) in the case of foreseeable events like engine failure or weather requirin such
@@Drabkikker Interesting. Thanks for the explanation! Now a follow-up question I have is then why did the low pressure weather conditions affect it? How would they have been able to take off on a short runway with enough fuel if there was higher pressure?
@@PedroContipelli2 Low pressure means that the airport is functionally at a higher altitude. With less air to work with, the plane has to go faster to get the same amount of lift; that in turn means it needs a longer runway.
I was so confused about this too, surprised nobody else was haha
I know someone who lives in Newcastle. Just gonna send her this see what she thinks about the Newcastle talk
Before I've seen the answer. 2 options I see:
1: hurricane or similar storm blocked the transoceanic routes and they detoured to the next open route.
2: weather affected the services at the airport so they detoured for fuel or similar.
Edit. Close but not quite. I initially thought that the pumpers were offline not that takeoff weight was an issue.
I'd guessed right fairly early - but had the advantage of already knowing that low atmospheric density (often caused by high temperatures) reduces take-off performance. (But I'd first gone down the same wrong path Tom did about icing; before also realizing that must be wrong)
Just based on the question without hearing them discussing it, don't most flights take what appears to be strange paths based on mercator projected maps, but make sense once you look at a globe? Like don't flights from London to New York for example fly over Greenland? Glasgow isn't that far north of Newcastle from what I remember.
Nevermind completely off lol
This one seemed to be less 'lateral' than the usual, requiring more knowledge on the subject
Even when the answer was given, I still had to look up just why that weather had that particular effect on planes and airports (and learned something in the process), so if you weren't already familiar with that knowledge I'm not sure if anyone could have found it by themselves.
And conversely, the answer felt semi-obvious for me from the get-go because I'm an aviation fan, so it seemed pretty straightforward. I did think that was just that initial guess that goes to the trash bin pretty quickly as details are dug up, but it ended up being the correct one all the way to the end.
Not enough thick air for lift and not enough length to get up to get up to speed.
Hey is it possible to get the question in the video description? My stupid brain is constantly forgetting and needing to go back to the start
Please Tom, release the video versions of your recordings. Thank you!
John Denver once sang about Toledo that he spent a week there one day.
This is the first time I guessed at the very beginning correctly!
When the question was introduced, I was sure that the storm was going to be in Newcastle (Ireland) and that they had to divert by Glasgow to go around it due to the movement of the storm. Glad I was wrong; this was more interesting than that!
I think Tom should do a video at Newcastle Airport, as it has a feature that Nova airport in the world has. A Greggs.
I was going to go with the runway idea, except that the reason was they couldn't take off with enough 'refreshments' for a planeload of partiers.
My brother got married in Cancun in 2019. I flew through Atlanta both ways from Lexington KY. I had my option of either either flying on my brother's wife's dad's charter plane both ways but stupidly chose not to. Everyone not going on the charter plane, like me chose to fly in and out a day early and we all got the same flights in and out (except my uncle). On the way home, the Atlanta to Lexington flight, although not canceled or delayed got swapped for a plane half the capacity (I think 56 seats vs 112+ seats. I think it was for mechanical reasons and the smaller plane was what was approved to go to Lexington vs something else (I asked)). It was over a day later before we flew back to Lexington, because Delta was waiting for a flight where all of us could be together on the same flight.
I honestly thought geodesics were going to factor into this one somewhere along the way, haha.
what's the relation between runway distance and plane fuel?
Planes containing more fuel are heavier. The more weight inside the plane, the longer a runway the plane will need to take off.
Initial thoughts: the weather made it so that the nearby airports/airspace, including Newcastle itself, would be unavailable/overloaded and thus not able to accept the 787 (e.g. need to clear runways of snow/ice, actively rerouting default approach/departure paths around a storm, accept more traffic from other airports, higher safety margins needed reducing capacities...). The simplest reason here would be that a big (too) rough storm is blocking the usual departure route, and they must go around it.
In any case, in the event of a problem, especially right after takeoff, planes need to be able to reach a suitable runway to land safely (Sully landing in the Hudson river right after takeoff is an example where they couldn't do that). A 787 is a big aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers, and thus need a big runway (few of them available nearby). So, they routed the flight toward suitable runways in clearer skies along the way (Glasgow/Edinburgh/Belfast).
Results: I did not think of the fuel; I should have thought of the fuel. I was close in reasoning, but no cigar.
But then, why didn't they refuel in a south, en-route, airport like Manchester, Liverpool, or Dublin? Shirley, they have big enough airports?
Improv: Yes, and...
Lateral: No, but..
I was once told while talking off from Glasgow that we needed to wait for equipment to arrive to start the engine. That's obviously not it but I couldn't get that out of my head.
Now I'm imagining a guy walking up to the plane carrying a crank handle.
They were probably really waiting for a tug to push the plane back from the gate.
@@JuhanaSiren No, apparently to start a jet's engines, you need an external device. Some are called ground power units but there are other pressurised air injection systems out might have been depending on the aircraft.
@@ThePeadar2211 All passenger jets have an APU (Auxiliary Power Unit, i.e. a small turbine engine), it's in the tail and why you see a small exhaust port there. They provide the AC and sometimes the power when on the ground (depends on the airport), and provide the bleed air to start the main engines. If the APU is broken, it still might be considered safe to fly, but you would need a ground cart to start one of the main engines. Other possibility is that they it was functional but the hydraulic accumulator used to start it didn't have enough pressure or just failed that one time for some reason (it can happen). So again, you would need a ground cart to start the main engines.
Im from Newcastle i live here still, hes not wrong about the bigg market
And it's only 50-odd miles from Newcastle to Glasgow. They'd hardly get properly into the air before starting their descent into Glasgow.
So one could make the trip on just the fumes in the tanks...
these vids make my day:)
This needs answering - what the HECK was Tom doing in the Big Market at 1am...? Id never class that as his natural environment
Given that he hasn't got over it yet, it clearly isn't!
"Up" to Glasgow?
The lack of understanding of great circle routes in this video is a bit worrying. Flights often head further north when going East-West etc to take the shortest route.
Venga Aiirways!
I dont get why runway length has anything to do with the amount of fuel.is it because fuel weighs it down?
it could be because of acceleration? but yeah idk anything about planes so take my opinion with a grain of salt
Every country has a city who's name means Newcastle, so I was wondering which 'Newcastle' they were avoiding.
I feel like a few of the clips from this episode have been misses.
Prediction: En-route weather forces a longer route which would need more fuel than the 787 can take off from at Leeds. Glasgow has a massive runway.
I remember my first flight out of the US, the ground crew had put _too_ _much_ fuel in the plane. The captain determined that the plane was too heavy and we couldn't make it. Unfortunately the airport (LAX) only had one vehicle that could pump fuel out, and it was in the shop. So, eventually the captain got the airline to unload a couple of freight containers to get the weight down to an acceptable level. It didn't involve a diversion for that, but did make us late enough to the destination that a lot of connections were missed.
Thanks for that story, I was so confused as to why the short runway mattered, I didn't realize that because it was short it had to have less fuel so it could take off with less weight
I thoughtt it was because Glasgow had just hit a current of wind and they would get fuel efficiency by diverting.
winds are the other way, wind currents are clockwise in the northern hemisphere,
Is there a chance we'll ever get a TechDif special or is Tom still too traumatized from Two Of These People Are Lying?
This... really doesn't feel that unusual or confusing. The great-circle intersecting Cancun and Newcastle runs like, north-west from Newcastle anyway. South on the map doesn't mean the plane will fly south. Idk, the question feels like a bit of a miss for me.
I'm guessing that Glasgow in this case is NOT the one in Scotland, and probably the second Newcastle in the question is not the same as the one where the flight originated. With Great Circle flights and ETOPS rules, the flight almost certainly goes near or over eastern Canada / US, and those names are probably re-used in both countries multiple times.
Earth is a globe so visiting Glasgow is not as big of a detour as it may seem.
Except it is bcuz we dont fly over the globes pole bcuz of the ice walls.
No wait, not that, its the fact that theres no airports up there to land at in case of emergency and we arent gonna send planes full of hundreds on a potential life endin journey with no possible emergency exit plan other than freezin in the icy waters that boats find hard to get into even to this day...
Like, id rather it be a slight detour instd of takin the technically faster route which doesnt consider how to save any of us in the event of an emergency
Am I the only one seeing black screen instead of the video?
First