On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:21:16 +0000, Neil Gould wrote:

Recently, Greg Copeland posted:

Is this common? How many run their tank(s) dry as part of their fuel
management strategy? If you don't run dry, why not?

Two main reasons; there are better ways to gauge your fuel consumption
rate, for example, logging how much fuel you put back in the tank after
the flight; and why play with the trim to keep the plane going in a
straight line, then start all over again with that fiddling when you
switch tanks?

Aside from the
heat beat skipping which is sure to follow the first couple of times,
what's the down side to this strategy?

Besides being pointless? How about being uneccesarily risky?


"I know of no accidents that have occurred because an engine would not
restart when supplied with fuel in flight. I have personally done this
literally thousands of times myself, and never seen more than a couple of
seconds of interruption, even when I was completely unaware the engine was
about to quit. If we count all the people I know who routinely did it,
there are literally millions of such events." -John Deakin

"This is simply not true of recips. When a recip runs out of fuel, nothing
else has changed. The spark is still there on every power stroke, the
piston is still pumping air, driven by the prop, which is nearly
impossible to stop, inflight even when you want to. Two of the "three
necessities" (fuel, air, spark) remain, totally unaffected by the lack of
fuel." -John Deakin

So what risk factor can you assign to what is more or less, a non-event?

As for the "why", John Says, "I'd like to take a look at fuel management,
and since my method sometimes calls for running a tank dry, let's get that
out of the way first." In other words, its his strategy for fuel
management which lets him known and understand how much he really has in
reserve and how much can he get out of the "unuseable". Should he have an
event where he has to bite into his reserves, he never has to say, "I sure
hope I have enough. I wonder how much is there".

This is not to say that I've bought into it, but hey, someone has to play
Devil's Advocate!

Greg