Some thoughts

[bellinghman]

It's horrible to hear of the crash at Cork airport this morning.

One question that has been raised is whether the crew were making a third attempt to land at a strongly fog-bound airport because their fuel level was low enough as to give them little other option. The initial Wikipedia report indicates that it had been in the air for about 2 hours at that point. Now, depending on model, the Fairchild Swearingen Metroliner (also according to Wikipedia) may have a range as little as 1,065 km, and a cruising speed of 515 km/h.

That indicates a duration of about two hours.

If so, there might not have been sufficient fuel to divert somewhere with no fog.

I make the distance from Belfast to Cork to be about 350 km, so flight time should be about 40 minutes. Even with departure time (taxiing and waiting for a runway) tacked on, they should have been nowhere near two hours.

Comments

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

There certainly should be other strips capable of taking a smallish plane like that one. It's not like it's a Concorde getting into Heathrow.

What was making me wonder was that it was supposedly meant to arrive at about 09:00, and yet the crash was reported as 'sometime before 10:15', which implies a time over an hour later. (Though 09:00 is before 10:15, the phrase implies sometime after 10:00.)

At this stage, there's a lot of confusion around, and the figures will straighten out later. It's moot whether that will be before or after we know whether Egypt is due for an early change of President.

[irishkate.livejournal.com]

no kidding.