Update on the Allegiant Air Flight That Almost Ran Out of Fuel

Jeanne Marie Hoffman July 29, 2015 News 2 Comments

The FAA has announced an investigation into the Allegiant Air flight that had to declare an emergency landing at an airport that was currently closed.

I had a lot of questions about this because something wasn’t adding up. Â Readers had a lot of questions in the comments and on Twitter too.

Where is that “margin of safety?”-> #Allegiant Air Almost Runs Out of Fuel at Closed Airport http://t.co/wg1Ul4aAn9 @Le_ChicGeek

â€” Joseph N (@joseph_no) July 28, 2015

omatravelÂ

Somthings fishy with the story. FAA rules require a plane to have enough fuel at takeoff to travel to an alternate airport + 45 minutes.

So either they took off in violation of FAA regs or they circled for far longer than the article implies.

For more of the discussion, see the original post.

But the FAA also feels like something is fishy–and their investigation has answered one question for us.

According to TechTimes, the FAA is investigating why the airline only hadÂ three minutes of fuel reserve.

It looks like the air traffic control and the flight were in contact as soon as the aircraft reached the airport. Â Even if the airport wasn’t closed, this wouldn’t be enough fuel for any minor delays (too much traffic on the runway, etc).

Edit: Â Fargo Airport was closed and the flight wasÂ en-routeÂ from Las Vegas to Fargo on July 27th, 2015 when this occurred.Â

This makes the whole thingÂ fishier, but at least dispels what a lot of people assumed at first–that the plane circled for a while. Â Because who the heck would take off for an airport with no fuel reserves?

Apparently Allegiant Air.

Here’s an update on the update.

2 comments

Scott M.
July 29, 2015 at 7:27 pm

Your post never mentioned “Where” [the route flown] or “When” the event happened. [without clicking on a linked story]

In this post that attempted to read as an article, not a blog post, you left out two major elements of the story.

Journalism 101: In an article you always mention “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “When”, “Why”, and sometimes “How”.

Make sure to strive for these when trying to report an event in the future, and not just linking to another site without the important elements included in *your* post.

- Jeanne Marie Hoffman
  July 29, 2015 at 7:47 pm
  
  Thanks, I’ll add that in!