This may not apply to all airlines, or apply to today’s world, but I was watching a video on Britannia 226A crash from 1999. In the video, they mentioned that the pilots were under pressure to land, so they wouldn’t have to explain to their bosses why they landed with less than the minimum amount of fuel required.
If a plane takes off, has to abandon a landing attempt, or complete an extra go around, or has to stay in a holding pattern, or has to divert… but they land safely without incident nor issue, why would that be an issue? What else could the pilots do?
Edit to add the answer (thank you for all of the replies, everyone! I misunderstood entirely what the video was attempting to convey): There are aviation safety boards with strict rules and landing with low fuel is grounds for a report and an investigation into the flight, so the safety boards can find the root cause for why the flight did not have an adequate amount of fuel on landing. The pilots may get into trouble if the investigation finds they were at fault, but it is more geared towards safety and attributing a root cause for the issue to make a low fuel event less likely in the future.
In: 707
It’s a safety margin, a contingency to allow for diversion or several attempts at landing (or both)
The reason they were under pressure to land so they don’t have to explain to their bosses, is because the pilots are responsible for deciding the uplift of fuel – and they have to calculate it based on the information they have following the procedures set out either by the governing body or the airline (whichever is more)
In ‘just culture’ explaining to the boss wouldn’t result in discipline, but training they may have wanted to ideally avoid by getting it right in the first place – landing above minimum means they did get it right even if they were close and can factor that into decision making next time to be less close. Landing below means they probably need some more help with one or more things
Crashing is obviously bad, but there are a few things which are like ‘half-crashes’ – nothing bad actually happened, but still some stuff to be avoided next time to improve safety factors. Better to build off something that didn’t kill anybody than wait until it does
edit: also for clarity, minimum fuel is not for diverting, it’s what you have to land with. The fuel for diverting is a quantity taken on top of that, usually there’s enough on top of the minimum for several missed and several diversions, if you are below minimum something serious already went wrong before that point
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