Post-Annual Flight

On Feb 22, 7:15*am, B A R R Y wrote:
Jay Maynard wrote:
How does a fuel gauge that's so unreliable that you can't trust it to within
a quarter tank tell you whether you've got a fuel leak? That description
applies to every aircraft I flew during my primary training, late 1970s
vintage Cessna and Piper and Grumman products (this was in the late 1980s).
I was taught to verify the tank's level on preflight, and use time and
consumption per hour to figure usage.

That's my point.

Is "Airplane Sense" a simmer? *G

Only when I'm not flying for real.

I've rented dozens of planes throughout the US, and I don't recall any
in which the fuel gauges didn't perform well enough to provide at
least a rough cross-check of my calculations.

Look, aviation safety is about redundancy. And it's about being
prepared for unlikely but serious problems. So I find it disconcerting
to hear from pilots who habitually don't bother to perform a simple,
potentially useful cross-check, or who even habitually fly without the
required properly-working equipment to enable them to do so.