Post-Annual Flight

Jay Maynard wrote:
On 2008-02-21, wrote:
I never use the fuel gauges for anything other than
passing reference, since we do everything by visual inspection and the timer
in our Garmin GTX-327 transponder.
How do visual inspection or your timer tell you if you've got an in-
flight fuel leak? That's an important reason for the fuel-gauge
requirement.

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

"B A R R Y" wrote in message
et...
Jay Maynard wrote:
On 2008-02-21, wrote:
I never use the fuel gauges for anything other than
passing reference, since we do everything by visual inspection and the
timer
in our Garmin GTX-327 transponder.
How do visual inspection or your timer tell you if you've got an in-
flight fuel leak? That's an important reason for the fuel-gauge
requirement.

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

He certainly has not flown very many types of aircraft if he puts any trust
in fuel gages.

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.