2011-03 · NASA ASRS report 938862
An E145 flight crew; forced to cruise at FL250 vice their planned 370 due to an inoperative bleed; declared minimum fuel followed by a fuel emergency at their destination. The flight crew believed ATC to have been unresponsive to their needs.
During climb out; not long after takeoff; we got an ENG #2 Bleed Leak. We followed the AOM procedure and shut off the bleed; after which; we contacted Dispatch and Maintenance Control. We were told that because the Bleed Leak indication went out after the Bleed was shut off the aircraft was good to continue [at a maximum of FL250]. My concern was that we may not have the fuel because we were filed for FL370. Dispatch ran the numbers and said we had the gas. The weather was clear; the destination airport was reporting no restrictions and good weather; so I decided to continue. The flight went well. We were keeping a close eye on our fuel and I discussed with my First Officer that if we were not seeing the fuel burn we were expecting we would divert for more fuel. We got to ZZZ and they started vectoring us for the approach. I told the First Officer to report min fuel to let the controller know we needed min vectoring. My First Officer saw the airport before I did due to the orientation of the aircraft and I told him to call it so we could get cleared in. I ended up high on the approach and asked for a 360 to get down and we were told to take up a heading of 180 degrees away from the airport and we heard them start vectoring another flight toward the airport. At this point; after considering our fuel and not knowing how far out ATC was going to take us; I decided to declare an emergency. ATC started us back toward the airport and asked if we had traffic for our intended runway in sight and could we follow them in. I told my First Officer that we had declared an emergency and asked him to tell ATC we would be going straight for our intended runway to land. ATC had the traffic break off and cleared us to land. We made a normal landing and taxied to the gate.
Upon reaching the ZZZ area we were given a descent from FL250 to 16;000. Upon reaching 16;000 we were descended further to 8;000. The descent clearances came late from ATC which left us at a higher then normal altitude.We requested s-turns across final followed by a request for a left 360 when it became clear we were not in a position to land because of our altitude. After some careful consideration and when it became clear that we were not going to be turned back to the airport in a timely manner; the Captain instructed me to declare an emergency for fuel; which I did.
Source: NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (public domain). Reports are voluntary submissions and are not verified by NASA.
Loading the flight search…
Pick an aircraft model — Boeing 737, Airbus A320, A380, Boeing 787 Dreamliner and more — enter your origin airport, and FlightFinder shows every route that plane flies from there with live fares.
We support Boeing 737/747/757/767/777/787, the full Airbus A220/A319/A320/A321/A330/A340/A350/A380 family, Embraer E170/E175/E190/E195, Bombardier CRJ and Dash 8, and the ATR 42/72 turboprops.
Search and schedules are free. Pro ($4.99/month, $39/year, or $99 one-time lifetime) unlocks the enriched flight card — on-time stats, CO₂ per passenger, amenities, live gate & weather — plus My Trips with push alerts.
Live schedules come from Amadeus, AeroDataBox and Travelpayouts. Observed routes (which aircraft actually flew a given city pair) are crowdsourced from adsb.lol ADS-B data under the Open Database License.