Short fuel in the middle of the pacific

[edouardo17 0]

Hi everybody!

This morning, I woke up finding my PMDG 777 both engines shut down, starting its inescapable descent towards the pacific ocean... I took of the night before from NZAA, and was planning to land in KLAX today at around noon, after a good night of sleep...
According to my Flight Planner, my block fuel should be 124 tonnes... It seemed quite sufficient to me since only 88 tonnes were planned for the trip, the rest was contengency, alternate, ETOPS ...

So I woke up, no more fuel on board, both engines off, APU obvisouly unresponsive, and had about 5 or 10 minutes to restart both engines before the crash (even though it would've brought the realism level very close to zero, I still wanted to finish my flight)... I had nothing left working in the cockpit, which was close from its cold and dark state :( So no FMS to refuel the plane by cheating... So I now have two question:

1) How is it possible that the plane ran out of fuel, a whopping 3 hours before the actual ETA... Hint: I climbed to FL330, but as I was sleeping, I couldn't engage the other step climbs...
2) Is there a way, even though I doubt it, to manually refuel the plane, in a cold and dark state, with empty tanks, and no FMS? 

Many thanks in advance!

Edouard

[Ralgh 43]

I don't have any reason for why you ran out of fuel but you can use the auto step climb feature so it will do the steps while you are away.

[flightsimbadger 0]

Did you have strong headwinds?

[anden145 2,285]

I can't tell you, without any more information. I have a few theories, though:

• Strong headwinds?
• The classic: Substitution of KGS vs LBS?
• The plane weird off course somehow? Where you following your route?
• Some error in the flightplan, which caused the plane to stop following the programmed flightplan?
• Engine failure? Do you have failures to on/off?

[BlueStar 323]

7 hours ago, edouardo17 said:

How is it possible that the plane ran out of fuel, a whopping 3 hours before the actual ETA

I flew this about a week ago with these numbers with a TL029.

Planed time - 11 hours 10 minutes Actual 11 hours  5 minutes   TOW 677,283 lbs and  ZFW - 461,000 lbs.

Fuel Planned Release 217,138 lbs, Trip 188,395 lbs.  Arrival Fuel 27318. The Actual Arrival Fuel was 30,015 lbs. The climb profile was FL310/FL330/FL350/FL370. 

I used KLGB as my alternate (good weather) which only added 10 minutes to my reserves.  I used CI 085. Climbout 250/310//.84 and descent of .84/320/250.  

I don't think that not doing the step climbs would have made a lot of difference since you went to FL330.  One thing to remember that when heavy it is very important to stay on profile and derated climb.  My distance was G/C of 5671NM and F/P of 5723.  Hope this helps.  

 

[Mike777 163]

11 hours ago, edouardo17 said:

1) How is it possible that the plane ran out of fuel, a whopping 3 hours before the actual ETA... Hint: I climbed to FL330, but as I was sleeping, I couldn't engage the other step climbs...
2) Is there a way, even though I doubt it, to manually refuel the plane, in a cold and dark state, with empty tanks, and no FMS? 

1) Did you check the predicted fuel at your destination, after loading winds, on the Progress page?  If there  were a mistake in the flight plan or lbs instead of KGS, it would show up as zero fuel at destination.

2) You should be able to revive the CDU by clicking and holding the Menu button.  I'm not sure whether, with a dead battery, you would be able to start the APU, and you would probably have to re-enter the flight plan. 

Mike

 

[kevinh 409]

The golden rule is never go to sleep on the job. To each their own, but I don’t see the point in making a flight and not participating in most of it. Better to use time acceleration and supervise the flight than sleep through it.

It sounds like wind wasn’t accounted for in the planning. Either that or a tailwind was predicted and planned for but the weather engine didn’t provide it, or wasn’t loaded.

Edited March 12, 2018 by kevinh

[30K 72]

On 3/14/2018 at 3:36 AM, anthonyg96 said:

Get the remote cdu by virtual avionics

Got it but isn't compactible to V4 to my knowledge.