B-24 Liberator

"George R. Gonzalez" wrote:



As I recall thwe story, he knew the plane was a bit heavy, sio he told
the fueler guy to put 500 gallons total in the tanks.
The guy heard this as ADD 500 gallons, which put him waaay overweight.
Gann wrote that he could see the whites of the eyes of the guys on the
scaffolds repairing the Taj Mahal. Bigger than usual eyeballs, with a B-24
bearing down on you..



You'd think there would be some double-checks for this kind of
misunderstanding.



Well, there is...it's called 'The common sense filter'. You get
so used to using large numbers and so many of them when flying
that it pays to run the results of some critical computations
through the 'Common sense filter'. "OK, it's 0100L now, our fuel
endurance is 27 hours, our transit time is 9 hours so our PLE
time is 0530Z" ... Now does that make sense??.

Mind you, they're still happening...remember the Gimli Glider?
(btw, I met Bob Pearson about a month ago here)
--

-Gord.