10mo ago

Traveler ordered to pay more than $5,000 in fuel costs after flight diverted due to bad behavior

www.cnn.com

Traveler ordered to pay more than $5,000 in fuel costs after flight diverted due to bad behavior | CNN

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

58 comments

Get this in America.
One unruly passenger should not have the power to control 300 other flyers' plans.
- They could cure a lot of it, if they stopped serving alcohol in the terminals or on the plane.
  
  Do you want mass murder? Because taking away a republican’s right to get drunk and express their anger for not being served first is unconstitutional, and against the principles in which this country was founded. Liberty and justice for me.
  
  But then how would I get my breakfast beer? Only at an airport do you get the plausibility of being accustomed to a different time zone.
  In all seriousness though, this is the classic "blame the person or the tool" argument.
  
  I had a layover in Midway at maybe 7:30am once. Everyone — and I mean everyone — was drinking. Like, are you going to get the shakes between security and boarding?
  
  Alcohol is the only way to survive the terribleness that is air travel, until such a time that weed vending machines become available in airports, or air travel becomes less shitty. The latter will never happen. Former inside of a decade.
  
  They'll never do that. Drug dealing is too lucrative and alcohol is the western world's favorite poison.
  
  Wow just directly parroting one corporate airlines solution to the hell that is airline travel? If they'd instead suggested that they fill the plane with knockout gas to put the passengers to sleep, would you be suggesting that here instead?
- They should outfit planes with brigs.
Honestly that’s way less than it should be given how much other passengers were inconvenienced. That might be harder to quantify the value of, though, I suppose.
- can start by reinbursing all passengers 3x their ticket value
- It must have been bad enough for the staff to decide that it's better to fuck up a plane full of passengers itinerary by turning around than continue on with the flight. I seriously doubt anyone would want to make that call unless they absolutely had to.
  
  Mr Rogers before, Tom Hanks now.
The single highest individual penalty, $40,823, was issued to a traveler who brought their own alcohol on board, was intoxicated, attempted to smoke marijuana in the lavatory, and sexually assaulted a flight attendant – all in a single flight.
Elon? You flying commercial these days?
- They said alcohol, not ketamine
  
  Maybe it was just to wash down some Ambien.
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.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  The Perth to Sydney flight is a longer one. I think around 3000km, so maybe they had a bigger fuel load
  
  Half the weight of a plane is the fuel??
- 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.
The story in the article about the guy who tried to get into the cockpit is amazing... he's lucky he didn't get himself killed by the other passengers. Since that little incident twenty years ago even Granny will chew on your face if it looks like you're pulling that shit.
Neither the man nor the airline was publicly named, nor was it specified exactly what he did to earn such a hefty penalty.
Why the hell not? I feel like it's weird for this information to not be public in a case like this-- In this same article, there are three examples of other incidents where the details are known.
Phrases like the passenger "was disruptive," and “It’s far simpler to obey the directions of airline staff than cause unnecessary issues, which can end up hitting you in the hip pocket” seem weirdly euphemistic to me.
Tell me you're from Perth without saying you're from Perth...
So does "dump fuel" literally mean "sprinkle a large volume of jet fuel over a large swathe of countryside?" Does it become diffuse enough that the environmental impact is negligible, or do we get a big splash that kills everything in an AoE?
Like... I'm surprised the fuel cost is the focus here, and not the environmental impact of releasing jet fuel just... into the air I guess? But maybe it doesn't work the way I'm picturing.
- That's exactly right. But much evaporates or is diffused over such a large area that no one particular piece of land gets a significant amount.
  The alternative is landing overweight, risking potential damage or failure to the aircraft's landing gear, full of human lives, while still full of the explodey stuff.
  The other alternative is designing planes to land at heavier weights, resulting in every other flight being less efficient.
  
  Thanks... Yeah that makes sense. I can understand that sometimes the trade-off would make dumping fuel the right choice... I just wonder if the environmental impact factor in.
- Dumping fuel is not uncommon.
  The plane needs to be a certain weight to land and so fuel burn is calculated into that.
  Obviously planes don't intend to dump fuel but there are unforeseen circumstances which mean necessitate this.
  It's hard to say but I should imagine dilution, has a large impact on any sort of environmental concerns.
- jet fuel isn't dumped that rarely, it diffuses over an enormous area and isn't significantly harmful to the ground, but is a greenhouse "gas" source iirc.

58 comments