You're confused why they should investigate how everyone on that flight came within minutes of dying?
Something about the fuel reserves, procedures, or execution was clearly flawed.
This is just clarifying the question from the perspective of an outsider.
That said, an investigation would be pretty reasonable, even if only to confirm that the abornamlity were forces majeures
- This does not happen once every 100k flights. That's once per day
- If this were happening once every 100k flights we would be adding another half hour to the reserve tomorrow.
I’m not an expert in this field, but it would seem that the weight of extra fuel would increase operating costs, so it’s is effectively insurance. How much extra fuel should be carried to account for unplanned events like this, while not carrying so much that it becomes cost prohibitive.
Edit: Here is the Wiki on incidents... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_starvation_and_fuel_exhau...
There were also two factors in the landing, that allowed for this to happen. You're going to be coming in really fast for a landing, when gliding in a commercial jet, and you don't have access to your thrust reversers to slow it down. There was a repurposed runway, that they used to land, that just happened to have been used as a drag racing track and had a guard rail. They were able to slow down by scraping across that. It also just so happened the nose gear didn't deploy fully so scraping the nose of the plane against the ground also helped slow it down.
Needless to say it was a bunch of very fortunate events that allowed it to not end in disaster. In any case I would consider it very risky.
The Gimli Glider was a case of many items of luck lining up.
From "all engine failure is never expected and not covered in training" to "Pearson was an experienced glider pilot familiar with techniques rarely needed in commercial flights" to the amount of maneuvers they had to execute on a barely responding aircraft
