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I listened to the episode (a while ago, not when I saw your post), and I'm 90% sure they stated quite explicitly that "they made a mistake converting between im

I listened to the episode (a while ago, not when I saw your post), and I'm 90% sure they stated quite explicitly that "they made a mistake converting between imperial and metric and only filled up half the tank". I'm going to allow some possibility that I got it horribly wrong and the podcast did, in fact, get it right, but I don't believe that's the case.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago
More to do justice to the story and its twists and turns this is courtesy of an AI transcription running on my podcast player (Snipd) : >This story is a bit like an onion. It's got layer er on the most superficial level, that sort of papery outer layer of the story, if you like. Why did this plane have too little fuel? The very simple reading is Speaker 1 They had a unit conversion error. So the people who were meant to be fueling the aircraft saw a number. They assumed it was pounds of fuel, when in fact, it was kilograms of fuel. And the reason they're even doing this in mass because if you fill up a car, you don't put the fuel in by mass, you do it by volume. Volume changes based on the ambient temperature. As things warm up, they tend to expand if they cool down, they tend to shrink. And if you're flying in aircraft, it's important you have the amount of fuel you're supposed to have. And so they made sure, instead of using the straightforward volume, they were going to use mass instead. And sadly, it was that attempt for extra precision that opened up the door for tis unit conversion era. ... >Speaker 1 And it was even obscured by one layer, because when they were doing the calculations, they weren't actually doing it in terms of the direct mass. They were using something called the specific gravity, which is tha cod measure of the density of the fuel. And so they used that to get back to the volume that they then had to put into the plane. And because there was this extra one layer of an opaque bit of putting it into a slightly different way of looking at it. They didn't realize that the units behind the specific gravity were based on kilograms, Speaker 2 And they assumed that they were based the old weigh on pounds.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

More to do justice to the story and its twists and turns this is courtesy of an AI transcription running on my podcast player (Snipd) : >This story is a bit like an onion. It's got layer er on the most superficial level, that sort of papery outer layer of the story, if you like. Why did this plane have too little fuel? The very simple reading is Speaker 1 They had a unit conversion error. So the people who were meant to be fueling the aircraft saw a number. They assumed it was pounds of fuel, when in fact, it was kilograms of fuel. And the reason they're even doing this in mass because if you fill up a car, you don't put the fuel in by mass, you do it by volume. Volume changes based on the ambient temperature. As things warm up, they tend to expand if they cool down, they tend to shrink. And if you're flying in aircraft, it's important you have the amount of fuel you're supposed to have. And so they made sure, instead of using the straightforward volume, they were going to use mass instead. And sadly, it was that attempt for extra precision that opened up the door for tis unit conversion era. ... >Speaker 1 And it was even obscured by one layer, because when they were doing the calculations, they weren't actually doing it in terms of the direct mass. They were using something called the specific gravity, which is tha cod measure of the density of the fuel. And so they used that to get back to the volume that they then had to put into the plane. And because there was this extra one layer of an opaque bit of putting it into a slightly different way of looking at it. They didn't realize that the units behind the specific gravity were based on kilograms, Speaker 2 And they assumed that they were based the old weigh on pounds.