Hacker News Reader

Any idea why he didn't land in Columbus?

In situations where there many diversions, sometimes secondary airports either get too busy to accept additional A/C or run out of space or crews to deal with them.

Sure, that makes sense. Does that likely mean there were other flights with even less fuel that had to land ahead of this plane, or how do they triage that situation? It seems like a failure to triage properly if one plane has to glide, but maybe I'm naive about how close all of the other planes are to gliding.

No planes had to glide.

Planes diverted to Columbus until they couldn’t accept any more diversions, at which point the rest diverted elsewhere. If any planes had a genuine fuel emergency where Columbus was the only option, other planes with more fuel would have been rediverted elsewhere.

My guess is there were too many other more urgent flights landing there at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com