Auckland Airport fuel supply obliterated by digger

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#1870279 21-Sep-2017 14:42

Linuxluver:
gzt: Both major operating systems have select/cut for a while now. It is a pain on mobile and takes practice, that's true.

In my phone the text being edited is one big lump of raw HTML.

I'm not touching that mess if it's more than a handful of lines. :-)

I had that. It may be a profile option. I recall it had two different effects for some reason..

gzt

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#1870282 21-Sep-2017 14:48

I looked up the definition of crisis. It does not appear to be a crisis. Having said that, the disruption does put fuel supplies at increased risk. There has been disruption to services but I'm not sure it qualifies for crisis level..

kryptonjohn

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#1870285 21-Sep-2017 14:50

One thing about all this that surprises the hell out of me: With no pipeline we can keep all the cars in Auckland happy but not the planes. Never realised how massive the fuel burn of airliners operating out of Auckland is.

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#1870292 21-Sep-2017 14:58

kryptonjohn:
One thing about all this that surprises the hell out of me: With no pipeline we can keep all the cars in Auckland happy but not the planes. Never realised how massive the fuel burn of airliners operating out of Auckland is.

Yup. Electric cars vs importing exporting business travel tourism. Not in a million years to scrape the surface of this carbon business.

Fred99

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#1870385 21-Sep-2017 16:49

kryptonjohn:

One thing about all this that surprises the hell out of me: With no pipeline we can keep all the cars in Auckland happy but not the planes. Never realised how massive the fuel burn of airliners operating out of Auckland is.

Are there figures available on how much jet fuel they normally sell at Akl airport?

I saw on stuff website comment about 8 tanker loads of fuel to fill an A380 from empty (perhaps they got that from this thread) but an A380 isn't going to arrive with empty tanks - nor depart with full tanks in many cases.

For reference, a family of 4 could fly to Chch - their share of the overall is using about 80 litres of jet fuel. The 1200km trip in a car averaging 8l/100km would use about 96l.

MikeB4

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#1870391 21-Sep-2017 17:01

An A380 carries around 320,000 litres and an A320 carries around 26,000 litres.

mattwnz

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#1870401 21-Sep-2017 17:16

gzt: I looked up the definition of crisis. It does not appear to be a crisis. Having said that, the disruption does put fuel supplies at increased risk. There has been disruption to services but I'm not sure it qualifies for crisis level..

It is somewhat subjective. Anything that affects the normal running of a country could be considered a crisis, and apparently government workers have been told not to travel for work related activities via plane, so that is potentially affecting how the country is run. Anyway, RNZ is referring to it as a crisis, and they are the national broadcaster. I haven't heard anyone of note in this, disputing that it is a crisis.

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kryptonjohn

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#1870420 21-Sep-2017 17:39

Yeah, I personally don't think it's a crisis. Nobody's in danger. Nobody's going out of business. A number of people are inconvenienced but only about 0.2% of the population. And some airlines are losing cash and might be looking at their fuel supply contracts for damages clauses. It makes NZ look a bit clownish to overseas pundits.

None of that makes it a crisis and RNZ calling it a crisis doesn't make it so. They might not be profit driven but they are still readership driven.

The media eh? <spit>

Fred99

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#1870423 21-Sep-2017 17:44

MikeB4:

An A380 carries around 320,000 litres and an A320 carries around 26,000 litres.

Yes - but they don't run planes to empty and fuel them only as required - it costs a lot of extra fuel use to fly with full tanks - this is apparently the fuel use per nm vs range for a 777:

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#1870424 21-Sep-2017 17:47

Fred99:

MikeB4:

An A380 carries around 320,000 litres and an A320 carries around 26,000 litres.

Yes - but they don't run planes to empty and fuel them only as required - it costs a lot of extra fuel use to fly with full tanks - this is apparently the fuel use per nm vs range for a 777:

The fuel carried is something like this

fuel = load x weather x altitude x distance + [load x distance to the next nearest airport] + some stated reserve percentage

gzt

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#1870488 21-Sep-2017 20:39

kryptonjohn:
The media eh? <spit>

That was not necessary.

gzt

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#1870490 21-Sep-2017 20:42

The refinery is advising the line will run at 80% capacity after repair until next year.

Aredwood

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#1870576 22-Sep-2017 02:30

mattwnz:

It was't that long ago when Auckland had a big power crisis (1 or 2 decades ago), which I recall was because there was only a single cable into the CBD. When will we learn?

Assuming you mean the 1998 or so power crisis, There were actually 4 cables back then. 2 were installed in the 1950s, other 2 in the 1970s. The root cause was that the cables were not installed with the correct backfill. They needed a backfill with good ability to conduct heat, but this wasn't provided. It was thought that just 1 cable out of the 4 could supply the entire CBD load - meaning plenty of redundancy. But in reality, after the thermal conductivity of the backfill was recalculated as part of the report into the power crisis. All 4 cables needed to be working to safely supply normal loads. So it was a case of thinking that you had redundancy, when in reality you didn't. The cables were also grouped in 2 pairs of 2.

How it happened - When the cables were first installed, it was assumed that they would only ever see peak loads in winter. They failed in a hot dry summer - peak load from aircon, dry ground not as good at conducting heat. The 2 1950s cables failed and there were no more repair kits readily available. Some talk at the time about redundancy loss but we still have the other 2 cables. One of the 70s cable fails, and the safe repair process states that if any repairs are needed to the 70s cables, both are to be turned off and load transferred to the 50s cables as the 70s cables are installed right next to each over. Except both of the 50s cables are still broken - Whoops

Alarm bells are starting to ring, they then started to build the temporary overhead cable into the city but they thought they would be able to manage with just 1 cable left, as they still thought that that cable could still handle the entire load. (except it couldn't). And the rest is history.

It also turned out that the cables were regularly failing, except that previously they were managing to repair them quickly enough. Yet they never bothered to figure out why they kept on failing.

frankv

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#1870593 22-Sep-2017 07:27

kryptonjohn:

One thing about all this that surprises the hell out of me: With no pipeline we can keep all the cars in Auckland happy but not the planes.

I think it's just coincidence. There's an average of about 8 days of each type of fuel stored at Wiri. The pipeline was pumping jet fuel when it broke, so I think the jet fuel reserve was low at the time. If it had happened a couple of weeks later, there might have only been (e.g.) 5 days of diesel reserves, and it would have been a trucking crisis. If the repair takes a few days longer than expected, there might yet be a petrol or diesel crisis.

sbiddle

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#1870629 22-Sep-2017 07:52

Fred99:

MikeB4:

An A380 carries around 320,000 litres and an A320 carries around 26,000 litres.

Yes - but they don't run planes to empty and fuel them only as required - it costs a lot of extra fuel use to fly with full tanks - this is apparently the fuel use per nm vs range for a 777:

This is also one of the fundamental issues when people talk about planes that can fly from NZ to the UK in the future. When you start approaching (or exceeding) a 20hr flight you're actually burning a huge amount of fuel just to carry the fuel required for such a distance. Does that actually stack up? Not necessarily. If you look at Qantas with their PER to LHR flights they have a very low density cabin to try and maximise passenger comfort for an 18hr flight.

The downside of this is more fuel + less passengers = more cost to the airline which ultimately means higher fares.

Given the choice of a 20ish hour flight from AKL to LHR direct when it becomes possible vs a 12hr and 10hr flight with a stopover I'd still far prefer the stopover.

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