Orval Fairbairn wrote:
In article . com,
"Robert M. Gary" wrote:

Insurance sets the requirements. The FAA doesn't care.


A lot of turbines have start/stop cycle limits, so short runs are
discouraged. Mostly, they would use a tug.

On the engines we had a cycle was defined as a start and increase to
full power, any amount of continuous run time, and a shutdown. So if
you did not go to full power you had a start but not a cycle.

Taxi was, however, a fuel killer. The tug (which ran on jet fuel)
would use less fuel in a week than we did with a single engine start
and taxi-which was against the rules anyway. On the three-holer you
could taxi on two, but the hotdogs would start just the center (#2) and
the APU.

Since maintenance had "other uses" for fuel the difference would,
somehow, vanish into thin air. The totally unsubstantiated and
scurrilous rumor was that it had absolutely nothing whatever to do with
the high numbers of diesel Benzes, Rabbits, and pickups in the parking
lot.

The _ballsy_ part, I thought, was the cases of non-detergent Grade 80
Aeroshell the company was buying, despite having not had a
recip-engined aircraft in the fleet since before most of the
maintenance department was out of grade school. Of course, it was pump
insurance, particularly for the VWs. The tugs _should_ have had this
oil added to their fuel as well, but saying so would have opened up a
can of worms, and in any event they lost no pumps or injectors to
lubricity as far as I knew.