Most experienced CFI runs out of gas

so what would you teach them?

What would I teach them?

Obviously I'm not communicating well. ( I appreciate your response - it
is just a subject very dear to my heart, after having come close to
being killed because my flight school didn't care enough to teach me how
things really are)

I would teach them to get to know everything there is to know about the
plane that they regularly fly, and to stop relying on data supplied by a
Cessna test pilot flying a new plane on a perfect day with the sole aim
of attaining the best figures he could get for the Cessna marketing
department to use in their promotions. I'd teach them to take ownership
of the situation, and stop relying on information supplied by people
whose butt is not sitting in the plane on the cross country that you
refer to.

And on their long cross country I'd teach them to land and dip the tanks
at the first opportunity, to confirm that the fuel consumption they
used in their calculations is the one that they are actually attaining.
And even then, understand that the seal can still fail at any time.
So if they have 39 gall tanks, and they have been in the air for more
than 2.5 hours, and they fly over an airport with fuel - land, and check
it.

Accurate fuel guages?
We can crawl out of our caves, discover all of the materials and
technology necessary to build a spacecraft, find the fuel, teach someone
to fly it - with total accuracy to a moon landing, AND throw in a
spacewalk on the way, but when they actually land, if they want to know
how much fuel they have left they have to climb up on the wing and dip
the tank with a stick - possibly the same stick we were clutching when
we crawled out of our cave

And round and round we go

Tony

--

Tony Roberts
PP-ASEL
VFR OTT
Night
Cessna 172H C-GICE




In article ,
Gerald Sylvester wrote:

tony roberts wrote:
I believe that it is a huge mistake to teaach student pilots that at a
given power setting their aircraft will average x gallons per hour.

so what would you teach them? If you dipped before and after and
noticed the fuel consumption all over the place, they still rent and
can only do it by the book plus a safety margin. That safety margin
can't be 50% like your 8 to 12 gph otherwise we'd never get a XC
in as we'd always be stopping for fuel every 5nm. The only
way around this is to have reliable and accurate gauges. I still
don't know why it is that difficult to make these.

Gerald

About fuel consumption: I use a scheme that would reduce the risk. I taxi out
on the tank I will not be using for take-off as a way of verifying that tank is
OK. Run up is done on the takeoff tank, offering some assurance that tank is
good also. (If I was in an airplane with someone who switched to the more full
tank after run up I'd get out!). I fly away half the available fuel in the take
off tank, switch to the other, fly that to near exhaustion, and when I switch
back to the takeoff tank my rule is, land for fuel.. I've modified IFR flight
plans en route to do this. BTW, it's not a big deal in a Mooney. It has 32
gallons usaable in each wing, I get 9 gph leaned at altitude, and the airplane
has more endurance than my bladder.

I remember talking to a guy who just put a CD player in his Vee tail Bonanza,
got caught up listening to some music and forgot to lean. He expected to burn
11 gph, was burning he said 17. That'd be an embarrising way to crash! Nothing
like checklists, huh?

(Michael) wrote in message . com...
...What we need are accurate fuel gauges that are cheap enough to make
retrofits sensible. As long as they have to be FAA certified, that
won't happen.

Hm. An FAA certified fuel gauge has to be right on two conditions:
full and empty. No assurances of correctness anywhere else. So, it
could bounce all over the place and then in the last quarter of the
tank rapidly descend to empty. I would like a higher standard myself.

-Malcolm Teas

"Mike O'Malley" wrote in
:

"C J Campbell" wrote in
message ...

"NW_PILOT" wrote in message
...


Maybe they get to relaxed and over confident?

It is called "complacency," but I think there is more to it than
that. If you play roulette long enough, sooner or later your number
is going to come
up.


Figure in as well, most 10,000+ hour pilots are flying professionally
at least in some way or another. As such, they're also flying much
more per year than other pilots. This dramatically increases their
exposure to said risk. I guess another way of saying it is, I'm
guessing that the small percentage of 10,000+ hour pilots that are out
there account for way more than 10% if the annual flying hours.





I think there is something else at play here. The 10,000+ hr pilot is
likely an airline pilot. I don't believe airline cockpit skills are
directly transferably to the GA cockpit. The single-pilot factor, lack
of system redundancies, and aircraft performance place a different set
of demands on a GA pilot. This may be an important factor in GA
accidents caused by airline pilots.

If you take the 10,000+ hr pilots, divide the number of accidents by the
number of hours they spend in a GA cockpit, I think we may find their
accident rate to be greater than other GA pilot groups. This is just a
guess. I don't have numbers to prove it.

Another interesting aspect of the Nall report is that student pilots
accounted for fewer accidents even though they accounted for more flying
hours.



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"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message .net...
"PaulH" wrote in message
om...
There can be plenty of reasons for this besides pilot error. A while
back one of my fuel drains developed a slow leak, and there are
probably a dozen other possibilities.

that is pilot error. You should be able to find that leak - 100LL leaves
stains. If it was so slow not to notice, then it should be slow enough not
to matter in a flight. There are few fuel problems that are not pilot
error.

The engine could have been burning too much too. I once rented a 182
topped it will full tanks and flew from Sacramento to Santa Barbara
(about 2.5 hours). I leaned the plane out on the trip. When I landed
there was only a small amount of fuel left in the tank. No evidence of
staining anywhere. The engine seemed to run strong. The FBO ended up
selling the plane so I don't know what the cause was.

-Robert

"Richard Hertz" no one@no one.com wrote in message .net...
"Robert M. Gary" wrote in message
om...
The local news is reporting that a local CFI (with over 30,000 hours
of instruction giving since the early 1960's) ran out of gas just
short of the airport after picking up a P210 and flying back from
Texas to California. Boy, if it can happen to him, it can happen to
anyone.

Um, no. It happens to people who fly with too little fuel.

I'm glad you are more confident than I am. Do you fly a retractable too?

-Robert

Robert M. Gary wrote:

that is pilot error. You should be able to find that leak - 100LL leaves
stains. If it was so slow not to notice, then it should be slow enough not
to matter in a flight. There are few fuel problems that are not pilot
error.


The engine could have been burning too much too. I once rented a 182
topped it will full tanks and flew from Sacramento to Santa Barbara
(about 2.5 hours).

Yep, ain't no way you're going to see a fuel leak on my plane. The
plane itself is blue and you can't see the drains in flight (low wing).

A few years ago coming out of annual, we fired up the plane, shut it down
checked under the cowl. Took it out, test flew it, opened it up and
looked problems. The next morning, we departed for Oshkosh. The
fuel consumption was staggering (I computed afterwards it was about
60 gal per hours). We landed and found a rather severe leak from
the fitting going into the engine driven fuel pump. Fuel evaporates
pretty quickly, so you couldn't see any indication of it once the
engine was stopped.

We had a group participant here put his Cardinal down off airport
after a carb problem caused much higher than expected fuel burns.

In article , Gerald
Sylvester wrote:
in as we'd always be stopping for fuel every 5nm. The only
way around this is to have reliable and accurate gauges. I still
don't know why it is that difficult to make these.

It isn't, and many planes DO have reliable and accurate (enough that
it's easy to tell if you've got less fuel than you thought you should
have) gauges.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

Bob Fry wrote in message ...
(Robert M. Gary) writes:

local CFI (with over 30,000 hours

Look at the hours. The more time exposed to potential incidents, the
more likely they are to happen.


While 30,000 hours is impressive. it really doesn't tell you much. How
did he get the majority of the 30,000. How much is sleeping in the
Bunk of a 747? How much is sitting in the right seat of the C-150? How
much time does he have in 210's?

He could have 30,000 hours and it could have been his 1st flight in a
210. I have little bit of time in a 210 and can attest that you have
to be very careful in determining how much fuel you have on board.


Brian

"Malcolm Teas" wrote in message
om...
Hm. An FAA certified fuel gauge has to be right on two conditions:
full and empty. No assurances of correctness anywhere else.

Illegal cell phones, and now this old wives tale?

It's retread week!