>June 1990>6 months after Avianca Flight 52 disaster>A avianca flight is stuck outside JFK>Mentions low fuel a couple times>Asks for “priority landing”>Mentions low fuel again>Gets cleared and lands>Turns out they had less than 10 minutes of fuel left and would have crashed if the landing failed>When asked they say they thought they had declared a emergency by asking for priority landing>We were less than 10 minutes away from a exact repeat of Avianca Flight 52 with the same airliner and same airport >August 1990>JFK Controllers mishear something about fuel from a Avianca flight, fuel and 15 minutes in the same sentence >Declare a fuel emergency on behalf of the plane(unheard of)>Planes lands>Turns out it had 2 hours of fuel>Pilots are like “Boy were we surprised? They should have waited for us to say something if they were worried”>That never happens again publically>Unofficially according to people who worked there JFK had an off the books policy for years after of treating any Avianca flight that mentioned fuel issues as an emergency and getting them down immediately, just without saying it out loud
