According to the Australian Federal Police, a then-32-year-old man from Western Australia was disruptive on a flight headed from Perth to Sydney. As a result, the plane had to turn around and go back to Perth, which meant that the pilot was forced to dump some fuel to land.
Now, the passenger has been ordered to pay $8,630 AUD ($5,806 USD) back to the airline to cover the cost of the wasted fuel. The Perth Magistrate Court also fined him $6,055, meaning that his mid-air misbehavior has a total price tag of $11,861 – likely many times higher than whatever h
The article doesn’t say why the pilot had to dump fuel to land. Was this because the plane needed to be lighter (dumping what would have otherwise been consumed)? If anyone can provide context that’d be appreciated.
They dump fuel so they can safely land due to weight, as you guessed. In this case it was a cross-country trip, so the plane had a fair amount of fuel that needed to be offloaded.
Airplanes are usually limited to land at only around half of the total weight they can take off with.
This isn’t normally a problem for normal trips.
If they went to a higher landing weight, the landing gear struts would have to be designed quite a bit stronger. This would make the landing gear heavier, and that would reduce the useful payload weight in the plane.
Half the weight of a plane is the fuel??
A350-900
Maximum takeoff weight: 283 tonnes
Maximum landing weight: 207 tonnes
Manufacturers’ empty weight: 115.7 tonnes
The Perth to Sydney flight is a longer one. I think around 3000km, so maybe they had a bigger fuel load
Which that’s something i find interesting about electric planes they’re testing. MTOW and MLW are almost identical in an electric plane. You can’t just dump fuel
Which is good for the environment but makes it really hard to design airplanes.
I’m guessing it’s comparable to designing SSTOs in KSP where it’s hard to get to orbit (and often back) on a single stage because you don’t get much lighter.
10/10 analogy 👌