Fuel exhaustion doesn’t mean there’s zero fuel on board. There is still unusable fuel and it doesn’t take much for that fuel sheen on the water.
How deep is the water there? Curious if they’ll bother bringing up the engines.
Kudos to the Controller for keeping everything going. Keep in mind she’s talking to crews on different frequencies that are walking allover other transmissions.

Yes she was task saturated due to min staffing. The point is will the FAA learn anything from this experience?

They reported the remaining engine was running really hot and were unable to maintain altitude. Firewalled I'd imagine, not likely fuel starvation.

250 fathoms. Piece of cake.

But not really necessary, Rhoades kept those JT8Ds really well maintained.

They had just taken off. I seriously, seriously doubt they ran out of gas that quickly.

theres a difference between fuel exhaustion and fuel starvation. You are referring to fuel starvation, not exhaustion. Exhaustion literally means you have no more fuel.

those familiar with aviation in Hawaii are not surprised that something like this happened with this particular operator. Glad that the pilots made it out. Sounds like one is in pretty bad shape. Comms could have been better in the beginning, but the controller got in the flow after realizing what was going on. She is one of the better ones in HNL and you could tell she was about to breakdown at the end of the recording.

250 feet maybe. 250 fathoms is not exactly a piece of cake, would require ADS diving. So $$$. And hoisting a plane up from depth is not cheap in any case, need a specialized salvage ship, barge, and tug.

They could get the orange boxes at a more reasonable cost, maybe even with an advanced ROV.

Documents that confirmed bad mx would be informative. But documents which "confirmed" good mx are not necessarily definitive.

OK so she was set up a little bit. But hold all taxis and departures. Manage arrivals by holding if possible or long vectors.

And where was her backup? I know they don't do solo shifts, how long does it take to get somebody from the break room?

Rhoades is not known for good maintenance. Quite the opposite actually. They had a main wheel come off a few years back on takeoff for Christ sakes.

I’m seeing a lot of hits on ATC here. My personal observation and one of the odd things about HNL is how the middle of the night ATC can operate like there’s almost no traffic when in fact there is frequently more traffic than can reasonably be handled by a single controller. I can’t recall being in the pattern alone in the middle of the night. Every brand of long haul freighter is coming and going at all hours, and before Covid we were frequently mixed up with passenger arrivals. Now that is back. She is clearly very busy with just normal traffic. I hope they will reconsider nocturnal staffing.