On Nov 15, 9:33 am, Roy Smith wrote:
In article
,

Kingfish wrote:
Odd how they'd be concerned with onboard fuel. You'd think by now it
either leaked out or has been contaminated by seawater and rendered
inert?

Even odder is that the article says, "a fuel supply error forced him to
make an emergency landing on the beach near Harlech". I read "fuel supply
error" as "running out of fuel". My guess is they're just trying to scare
the souvenir seekers away.

Unless, perhaps, by "error" they mean "malfunction"? Just
speculating, but: the P-38 had main and reserve tanks for each
engine. If for some reason the pilot waited too long to test his
ability to switch from main to reserve and was then unable to do so,
he might find himself having to land in an awful hurry. That could
also have caused it to land with a fair amount of fuel on board. I
don't know how the switching was handled on the -38, so I don't know
how likely a malfunction this was- switching failure on both engines
doesn't sound very likely but if there were common components between
both fuel systems one of those could have failed.

Granted, it would be poor technique to wait until your gas in one set
of tanks was gone to see if you could switch to the others, but
mistakes do happen.

-JTD