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