Running dry?

On 2005-08-22, Jay Honeck wrote:
- Checking the accuracy of your fuel gauges?

That's absurd -- anyone who relies on fuel gauges is an off-field landing
waiting to happen.

Some people who don't know how well their fuel gauges are working are
also an off-field landing waiting to happen. So you don't know how good
your fuel gauges are, so ignore them - then one day, for whatever
reason, you have a fuel leak or similar problem - and your watch says
you have 1.5 hours remaining, but you really have five minutes
remaining. If I own a plane, I damned well make sure the fuel gauges
work. I want them in my cross check. Working fuel gauges can tell you
that there's a problem.

As I said earlier, personally, I don't like running fuel tanks dry, but
I will run a tank fairly empty. Consider the Apache I used to fly with
four tanks. On a VFR cross country, I like to plan on an hour reserve
under normal circumstances. I'd rather not have that one hour divided
evenly between four fuel tanks! (Or would you argue an hour reserve is
too little?) I'd rather have the vast majority of that hour reserve in
one tank.

In my plane, it can take 10 to 12 seconds for fuel to feed from one of our
tip tanks. If I ran a main tank dry, the prop stopped

If you don't have an autofeathering prop, how will it stop?

--
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"