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Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Earlier this week, Torontoist received word of an alarming recent event at Pearson airport. It centers around an Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna, departing from Toronto on Monday night. During takeoff, the cockpit reported a problem concerning the plane's fuel filter. Alerting Pearson traffic control of the issue, the plane circled over Lake Ontario, dumped its fuel, and landed.
According to Livia Dandrea-Boehm, spokesperson for Austrian Airlines, the dumping of the fuel was due to a weight issue with the plane. "The fuel dumping was necessary, as the landing weight of the aircraft would have been too high," she said, in an e-mail to Torontoist.
After a brief inspection and repair, the plane was once again cleared for takeoff. Not exactly eager to put their lives in danger, a number of passengers refused to board. When the plane attempted its second flight of the night, it again experienced problems with the fuel filter and was forced to land. No fuel was dumped this time around, presumably due to the plane's light weight. Fewer passengers means a lighter plane, after all. Passengers were re-booked.
We're glad everyone was safe and the plane was able to land, but the incident brings to mind a number of questions. How often does this sort of thing happen? How often are planes dumping fuel into Lake Ontario? What sort of cleanup does the airport undertake? What sort of environmental impact does this have?
We contacted the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, the body responsible for managing Pearson, but were met with limited response. The public relations department would only confirm the incident had occurred, refusing to answer any questions regarding the fuel dump, the airport's procedures regarding such an incident, or whether or not fines were issued. Questions to the airline went similarly unanswered.
No wonder Toronto beaches are never safe for swimming!
Photo by Marc Lostracco.
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With an attitude like that, Torontoist should be changing its name to Alarmist. Google 'planes dumping fuel' and you'll realize that jet fuel is primarily kerosene that evaporates before it has a chance to hit the ground. This is a much safer and less polluting alternative to a burning airplane wreck.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0245b.shtml
Wow! I hope this becomes viral in Toronto so that enough noise is made to get something done about this. I mean, it's a necessary safety precaution, but perhaps more stringent measures before take-off would avoid this sort of thing, so perhaps any airline that has to dump fuel into a great lake should fined!
Re-blogging this on my blog, and I encourage everyone to do the same!
That's an interesting link, Nik B. Did you read down to the end, however?
It obviously sounds as though this Austrian Airlines flight didn't have a choice, but the question "How often are planes dumping fuel into Lake Ontario?" seems like a perfectly valid one to me.
I'd be more worried about the billions of tons of raw sewage dumped into the lake.
I agree about the sewage, and with the fact that this article is alarmist. Fuel being dumped "over" Lake Ontario and "into" Lake Ontario seem, by the FAA excerpt, to be two different things. The article also seems to suggest, without any evidence, that airline fuel dumping is connected to the elevated e.coli levels that lead to beach closings in Toronto. I don't see the connection.
When a plane takes off on a long range flight it has more weight due to fuel than its Maximum Landing Weight. In cases of an incident requiring "Land ASAP" the option to burn off the fuel by circling is not available and landing above certified landing weight might be unacceptably dangerous given the airport/runway the landing will occur at and thus fuel must be dumped.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/planes/q0054a.shtml
Short range aircraft like Air Canada's A320, WestJet's B737 and Porter's Q400 don't have the weight of fuel requiring a fuel dump and thus don't have the equipment to do so.
According to the GTAA there were four dumps at Pearson from 1998-2002 out of 48 in all of Canada
http://gtaa.com/documents/community/noise_management/nm_minutes_feb_1302.pdf (at page 4)
Transport Canada Rules of the Air on Fuel Dumping
http://www.tc.gc.ca/CivilAviation/publications/tp14371/RAC/6-1.htm (at 6.3.4)
Banning fuel dumps would seriously impinge on long range flights (as flights would probably have to depart with fuel loads no larger than MLW) and thus many Toronto immigrant communities but I would say that airlines should have to account to Transport Canada for each occurrence and pay a fee appropriate to cleaning a given volume of water if they don't already.
This kind of makes it sound like fuel dumps are kind of frivolous actions rather the necessary precautions with passengers' lives at stake. Sure polluting the lake is bad, if it's happening, but what are the real alternatives? I think if they could build fuel filters that didn't break, they would...
Rek: I don't think that anyone is seriously suggesting that passenger's lives are worth less than the potential impact of a fuel dump. However, I do think some of questions raised by myself (and shared by a few other Torontoist contributors) are valid nonetheless.
djw: I don't see where that connection was made. It was a joke. I have to stop using sarcasm over the Internet..
If you're seriously concerned about the environmental impact of evaporated hydrocarbons there are much bigger concerns at the local gas station, why don't we have vapour recovery systems when they are ubiquitous in the US? I bet more stuff evaporates off our gas stations daily than has been dumped out of aircraft in years.
Tying this to beach pollution is just bad journalism.
Nik: If the fuel evaporates before it hits the lake its not water polution its air polution. But its still polution! Or tell be your don't mind breathing air with kerosene in it?
Mike, kerosene in the air would pose less of a threat to living things than it would collecting in slicks on the lake and surrounding beaches. Kerosene in the air would be quickly dissipated by winds in the air to harmless concentrations. The vapors would then be further broken down into smaller carbon compounds by sunlight and oxygen.
"Where do those go?", I hear you asking.
The same place all the exhaust gases of anything with a tailpipe, where all the soot and ash of all those coal powered power plants that the province is so 'desperately' trying to shut down, where all those factories in Hamilton belch out their smoke to. A couple hundred pounds of highly-dissipated jet fuel in the air won't make a difference.
Points:
I remember this exact same thing happening on a flight to London when I was just a kid. It was probably 1988 and I was shocked by the polluting but all of the adults seemed to accept it as a matter of course.