Delta plane dumps fuel over Lake Michigan, returns to Detroit airport

[Adrahil]

21. Unlikely. Fuel dumping is not very common....

It's basically flushing money down the toilet. Flights are planned to land with fuel to land below safe landing limits. It's typically only done in cases where safety is involved.

I used to do a ton of flight testing for the Navy, and some of our tests required the planes to be at a high gross weight, so we loaded them up with external fuel tanks, which would then dump until down to safe weights for landing. But even then we used specially modified tanks that held water, and which could not connect to the planes fuel system.