What is there to talk about? It is not a negotiation. QF training was for the pilots to keep well away from this sort of event. If the CSM, who is after all, dealing with passengers day in, day out, can’t sort it out, then calling in a person who sees the world in black and white is not going to improve things. Demanding to see the captain would be a total loser of a proposition. You’re not going to see me, but you will be leaving.
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Interestingly the aircraft formed QF62 to BNE and did something similar on that sector coming back down south too...Any ideas what happened here on the 25 to HND? ETOPS issue? Bad WX?
QF25 (QFA25) Qantas Flight Tracking and History 16-Mar-2023 (SYD / YSSY-HND / RJTT) - FlightAware
Track Qantas (QF) #25 flight from Sydney to Tokyo Int'l (Haneda)
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You’d need to look at the tracks taken by other airlines on the same day. If they did similar, then it’s something common. So weather, ATC, volcano. That sort of thing. ETOPS is unlikely. The aircraft would not have been despatched from Sydney with less than 2 hours of ETOPs. There are MELs that would allow such departures, but pretty much invariably they do not allow it from a main base. Even so, the track makes no sense, as you could hold even a shorter ETOPs limit with a more easterly track.
Many things, probably the most important of which is money.
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Sorry, I'll have to leave you with a "don't have any reasonable answers" on this one.
I’d assume more than one tanker. As mentioned there will tankers out of a number bases along the route. They have to allow for failures along the way, not just of the tanker and its equipment, but also from the fighters. Basically they will always ensure that they have sufficient fuel to go somewhere if the tanking should fail. One effect of that is that they’ll tank up more often than you might expect. I don’t know whether they can refill the external tanks from the tanker, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t.
It’s generally relatively low, as you want the fighter to have sufficient excess power to be able to easily hold accurate formation. An F22 is probably a lot more lenient than others in this regard. A friend was flying the Tornado F3 in one of the Gulf unpleasantnesses, and it was notoriously short on power. I recall him saying that they sometimes put one engine into minimum afterburner, and then used the other for the adjustments. Apparently the effect was that fuel came in only marginally faster than it went out the other end.
Some pretty obvious ones. Toilet. Sleep. Toilet. Food service. Luggage stowage. Toilet. Search and rescue is something that also needs to be allowed for, so don’t be surprised if there is a P-8 or something of its ilk moving along the their track.
No. They will stay together, especially if there's only one fighter. If there is to be a tanker replacement, it would probably just hold in front of their track and the old tanker would drop them off at the new.
Whilst the cabin of an airliner is pressurised to a maximum of about 8,000', fighters are generally only pressurised to around half the aircraft's altitude. So whilst Tom Cruise and his ilk can take the masks off, they are not removed for more than a few seconds in the real world. Basically the cabin is not at a survivable altitude. It's almost impossible for an airliner to totally depress extremely rapidly and survive, but a fighter only has to lose the canopy, and you have instant depressurisation.
Fighters don't necessarily cruise all that fast either. Those drop tanks, whether full or empty, increase the form drag quite dramatically. So, even machines that might top out (for a few moments) at mach 2, most likely cruise slower than the average airliner. I recall overtaking a gaggle of F15s and their KC10 on one of the tracks between the mainland and Hawaii. We were probably doing around .84, and they were slower and lower.
O2?
Had to search... fascinating!
