Quote Originally Posted by Sir C View Post
Well, first of all, 'running out of fuel' is such an incredibly, unbelievably, ridiculously, mentally loony thing to do in an airliner, that to achieve it means actively, consciously and knowingly breaking the law before you launch and then again during the flight. I won't go into the technical details but you have to work really hard on the paperwork to disguise the fact that you're likely to approach your destination without loads, plenty, tons of fuel, never mind, 'very little'.

The old 146/RJ has 4 wing tanks feeding direct tank to engine, and because of the anhedral the centre tanks tend to vent slightly into the outers, so they empty first - and the generators run off engines 2 and 3. Which is a slightly unfortunate design, but ho-hum. So when 2 and 3 quit the gennies died and they were left with battery power only, which is only enough to run a basic T-panel and primary nav. They were floating around in between mountains, at night, int he weather, with no primary radar contact, with black EFIS and no FMS... fúcking hell, no wonder they were screaming.

The company was about to go broke and was desperately looking for investors. It was the owner of the company who decided to skipper the flight and not make an expensive fuel stop...
Watched one of those Aircraft Investigations programs and for some reason they calculated the fuel in old money rather than metric (or the other way around) and promptly ran out of fuel and crashed