Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left

Re:Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minu... by rz2k on Friday October 10, 2025 @03:47PM (#45542990)

This reminds of discussions following the Fukushima disaster where one commenter claimed that it wasn't a design flaw, because it was an extraordinary circumstance. I found this appalling, because I do not at all think that was the risk profile that was sold to the public; I think people believed that it was supposed to be designed to safely survive 1000-year earthquakes and the tsunamis that they create.

Likewise, I think that the flying public is lead to believe fuel exhaustion is so rare that when airlines are compliant with regulations, no such disasters across all flights across all carriers will occur during your lifetime.

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Re:Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minu... by philipallstar on Friday October 10, 2025 @05:14PM (#45543857)

I'm sure we can all remember at least one person in any situation who will say something we find memorably awful.

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Re:Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minu... by pornel on Friday October 10, 2025 @05:35PM (#45544051)

It's also a communication problem, because labels like "100-year/1000-year event" are easily misunderstood.

* they're derived from an estimated probability of the event (independently) happening each year. It doesn't mean that it won't happen for n years. The probability is the same every year.

* the probabilities are estimates, trying to predict extreme outliers. Usually from less than 100s of years of data, using sparse records that may have never recorded a single outlier.

* years = 1/annual_probability ends up giving large time spans for small probabilities. It means that uncertainty between 0.00001% and 0.00002% looks "off by 500 years".

https://practical.engineering/blog/2025/9/16/an-engineers-pe...

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Re:Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minu... by kqr on Saturday October 11, 2025 @01:48AM (#45546911)

I find a useful exercise is to have a cheat sheet of historic flood heights in some area, tell someone the first record high, ask them how high they would make the levee and how long they think it would last. Peoples' sense for extremal events is bad.

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Re:Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minu... by jacquesm on Saturday October 11, 2025 @02:17AM (#45547037)

That's a great exercise. Where I live a lot of people died because in the past we were not able to make that guess correctly. A lot was learned, at great expense.

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