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Old September 29th 20, 03:47 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Dan Marotta
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Posts: 4,601
Default Landing on the Hudson is cool. Check this out

Well, Tom, now that you mention it, I never received training on use of
the drip stick beyond, "Pull it down until your feet get wet."
Fortunately, I never had to use it.

On 9/28/2020 8:27 PM, 2G wrote:
On Monday, September 28, 2020 at 8:45:06 AM UTC-7, Michael Opitz wrote:
At 16:32 27 September 2020, Dan Marotta wrote:
The last Boeing I flew was the 727 and it had fuel gauges behind a

panel
on the under side of the right wing.Â* There was also a calibrated drip
stick.Â* I imagine the 767 has similar provisions and I also imagine that
the aircraft's MEL does not include the fuel gauges in the cockpit.Â* But
then I'm just imagining things...Â* In the first article I read about
this incident, a long time ago, they mentioned the inoperative cockpit
gauges and I think it mentioned that the flight was legal with no
in-cockpit gauges.

Dan,

That was just it. The dripsticks do read in Pounds, and the crew
thought that because they were in Canada, the sticks would be
reading in Kilos. The crew assumed wrong by a factor of 2.2,
so they had less than half the fuel than they thought when they
had finished fueling. Lots of errors... Obviously no before fueling
dripstick readings, or paper calculations after getting the fuel offload
receipt from the fuel truck, etc....

RO

The dripsticks don't read in pounds (a unit of weight), they read in cm (a unit of distance). The dripstick reading was converted to liters (a unit of volume) using fuel tank tables for the 767. The pilots and the ground crew screwed up when converting the volume (liters) to mass (kg) by using the wrong conversion factor (specific gravity) as I mentioned earlier. They ended up with a figure in pounds when the assumed it was kg, off by a factor of 2.2. This is all covered in agonizing detail in the accident investigation report that I referenced earlier. Incredibly, none of the crew, either ground or air, received any training in making these calculations.

Tom


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Dan, 5J