FAA guidelines called too skimpy
It has been nearly 20 years since a commercial passenger airliner crashed in the United States because it ran out of fuel, according to the aviation safety site AirSafe.com. An Avianca Airlines 707 flying from Bogota, Colombia, fell 16 miles short of John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 20, 1990, killing 73 passengers.

Numerous regulations, guidelines and fail-safes are built in to the U.S. aviation system to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But the incident reports reflect pilots’ concerns that the margin of error could be narrowing.

Some pilots accuse dispatchers of underestimating or overlooking flight conditions so they could say the fuel allocations they recommended met the FAA’s requirements.

“A combination of minimum fuel flight planning with unrealistic flight plans combine to create hazardous fuel situations,” the pilot of a Boeing 737 wrote. “... Flight plans are issued, according to written guidance, without regard for the reality of the day.”

Following local news reports late last year that some airliners were arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey with dangerously little fuel left in their tanks, Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, said: “We don't have any indication right now that airlines are flying planes with less than the required amount of fuel.”

But Schricker said, “Management is juggling, and what they do by doing that is they decrease the margin of safety.”

As a result, said Russ Miller, an air traffic controller at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, aircraft now often sound minimum-fuel alerts while they are in holding patterns.

“It puts a lot of pressure on the system when they’re trying to run at the margins,” Miller said.

Senators demand federal action
Until now, evidence that planes could be flying with inadequate fuel was chiefly anecdotal, but even then, it was troubling enough to catch the attention of Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez, D-N.J. They called on the Transportation Department in November to investigate the Newark stories.

“Operating under these conditions regularly can put passengers at risk, especially if multiple landing attempts must be made,” Lautenberg wrote in a letter to Calvin L. Scovel, the Transportation Department’s inspector general.

In a report released Wednesday, the Transportation Department’s inspector general confirmed that based on its study of 20 sample arrivals, “minimum and emergency fuel declarations had increased on flights into the Newark area,” most of them on international flights. It said the FAA was reviewing when and how pilots should declare minimum and emergency fuel declarations at Liberty Airport.

Among the possible causes the report cited for the fuel declarations were “fuel-saving measures” that were instigated after Continental Airlines issued the two fuel bulleints last year, in February and October. The second bulletin expressly tied “excessive” refueling to lower profits.

Continental officials reassured the investigators that it was not their intention to pressure pilots to fly with insufficient fuel, the report said.

The report blamed the rash of low-fuel declarations on flights into Newark primarily on “confusion among flight crew members and air traffic controllers about the difference between minimum and emergency fuel declarations.”

Pilots speak out publicly
The filings reviewed by msnbc.com are the first public documentation of pilots’ misgivings. The number of fuel supply complaints — which are included in more than half of all reports detailing flights on which crews declared a “minimum fuel” situation or a more critical “fuel emergency” — and the consistency of their message suggest that concern over fuel levels is widespread.

“It is obvious to me that in order to save the high fuel price ... we were dispatched with a minimum fuel load,” the captain of an Airbus A319 wrote after an incident last year. “Dispatchers often cut it so close to save a couple hundred dollars and risk a diversion with the expenses of more fuel, missed connections, out of base customs and longer crew days.”

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