B6 En-route Stop Question

[AirTranTUS]

Hi everyone. This is my first post at this site. Some may recognize me from another aviation forum, but since that one is having so many issues, I am posting here.

Since it is winter and the Jet Stream is blowing ferociously across the continental US, transcons take longer and less-capable aircraft must stop en-route. B6 has multiple flights daily that must do this. My question concerns one particular flight that stopped in PHX today: 353 (JFK-BUR). While flying over Arizona, it made a sharp 90 degree turn to land at PHX. Ground time was less than an hour, and considering that flight 209 (JFK-LGB) also stopped at PHX today, I figure it needed fuel. But if they needed fuel, why did they make a 90 degree turn to land at PHX? Wouldn't they have known farther out that they didn't have enough to make it to BUR with adequate reserves? It looks like they determined rather late they needed to stop, thus the sharp turn. Or maybe they were on the edge and stopped to be safe. Can anyone help me out?

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/J...529Z/KJFK/KPHX

[CathayPacific]

What I find interesting is that, from the point it turns southwards to PHX, it could have continued to fly in the original westward direction and reach LAS at about the same distance. So why not refueling at LAS instead which is closer to Burbank?

[AA 1818]

Maybe fuel prices are cheaper at PHX? Maybe LAS was packed and time spent on the tarmac would have been more? I mean, maybe the time on the ground may have exceeded the time that it took to divert to PHX?

[DAL767-400ER]

What I find interesting is that, from the point it turns southwards to PHX, it could have continued to fly in the original westward direction and reach LAS at about the same distance. So why not refueling at LAS instead which is closer to Burbank?

It's not really fully evident from the Flightaware map, but the flight turned south approximately over Flagstaff, and the distance from FLG to LAS is almost twice as long as to PHX. Looks like the crew, or flight planning, either grossly underestimated the headwinds, or the winds ended up being way stronger than they were expected to be when the flight plan was filed.

[ptbodale]

I guess the big question is whether the flight had a preplanned tech stop. At AC we plan the tech stop in advance and if enroute the winds or ATC make the non-stop possible we drop the stop.

With the winds being hard down the nose going westbound the other option is to leave the Cargo or some pax behind to make the non-stop. That's my departments decision as the Flt Dispatcher and the Load Agents do their job then advise me that they are "X" number of kgs into load and what do I want to do from the commercial side. Depending on the connections from the destination (and other associated costs like crew duty time) we either tech stop enroute of leave cargo/pax behind.

[Van Hoolio]

If you look at the full flight aware history, you can see that JBU353 had also considered diverting to LAS. Maybe station ops at LAS couldn't handle the divert and that's way they went to PHX.

That hard turn to the south is only the last 20 minutes of the flight or so tops. Maybe they were put onto one of the arrivals for sequencing into PHX.

Mike