A few moments after a Bulgarian Airliner took off from BG Airport, it radio that it had a malfunction on board and would need to return to the airport. The plane circled over sea to dump it’s fuel and was then permitted to return to the airport – but with the Israeli Air Force escorting it. It is not clear as to why the IAF chose to do this – but it is being reported that they suspected that the plane did not have a malfunction.
Upon landing at the airport, all passengers needed to go through intense security screening.
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5 Responses
Why did they have to dump the fuel?
You can not land a plane with a full tank, if you read carefully you will see that it says that a few moments after taking off, the plane had a malfunction and needed to return to the airport.
Caracas,
You can land a plane with a full tank. In this scenerio would you want to? In most problem landings they ‘dump’ the fuel for safety reasons. This way if the plane crashes when landing there is less stuff to ignite and burn.
That said, I believe the IAF always escorts troubled airliners (in otherwords unschedules events) to the runway. Its there standard procedure.
Esrog/Caracas
The landing weight of transport category aircraft is always less than the takeoff weight
After departure at maximum gross weight, a certain amount of fuel must be burned, or dumped, to get the weight down to max landing weight. It has nothing to do with crashing and fires but the structural strength of the airframe.
the maximum landing weight of a plane is always less than max take-off.
it is quite simple: the plane has kinetic energy which is proportional to its weight. if you want to stop after landing, that energy has to be absorbed by the brakes (except that which is absorbed by aerodynamic drag). if the weight is too high, the brakes are likely to overheat and cause a fire which at the very least will damage the undercarraige.
dumping fuel is therefore necessary. swissair flight 111 also had to dump fuel just off Nova Scotia, but in that case they didnt realize that it would have been better to land and risk the event of a fire on the ground than continue to fly with a fire on board.