Narrative:

There were thunderstorms in the mia area. While trying to get into mia we requested deviations and finally got a routing that would bring us in on the west side away from most of the WX. While trying to get sequenced into the arrival flow the vectors took us further west and south. The vectors took us over ZZZ and west into the gulf and then south towards eyw. We were getting closer to our diversion fuel; but it still looked like we could make it into mia with the fuel we had. The WX at mia had some thunderstorms around the airport and they keep slowing us down with more vectors. We asked if declaring 'minimal fuel' it would get us in faster. They said it might; so we did declared 'minimal fuel'. After a couple of minutes and seeing the WX around mia on the radar; we decided that this was not a good idea and told mia center we were canceling the 'minimal fuel' call and diverted to ZZZ. We got more fuel and continued to mia without any further problems.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: B737 Captain reports requesting weather deviations during arrival into MIA; eventually resulting in a minimum fuel declaration. After more vectoring and a better look at the weather around MIA with the Radar; the crew elects to divert for fuel.

Narrative: There were thunderstorms in the MIA area. While trying to get into MIA we requested deviations and finally got a routing that would bring us in on the west side away from most of the WX. While trying to get sequenced into the arrival flow the vectors took us further west and south. The vectors took us over ZZZ and west into the gulf and then south towards EYW. We were getting closer to our diversion fuel; but it still looked like we could make it into MIA with the fuel we had. The WX at MIA had some thunderstorms around the airport and they keep slowing us down with more vectors. We asked if declaring 'minimal fuel' it would get us in faster. They said it might; so we did declared 'minimal fuel'. After a couple of minutes and seeing the WX around MIA on the radar; we decided that this was not a good idea and told MIA center we were canceling the 'minimal fuel' call and diverted to ZZZ. We got more fuel and continued to MIA without any further problems.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.