Ron Wanttaja wrote:

No. All I said on my original posting was that 4.2% (I posted "about
4.5%") of all homebuilt accidents in the January 1998 to December 2000 time
period (29/692) involved fuel exhaustion. I make no claim about how much
fuel remained in the remaining 660-odd accidents that year, other than to
guess that the NTSB investigator apparently considered there was sufficient
fuel on board to rule out lack of fuel as a reason for a loss of power
situation.

(Another complication is that it's fairly common to still
have gobs of fuel on board even when fuel starvation is the cause of the
accident.)

Out of the 29 cases of fuel exhaustion, two cases involved a crash during a
precautionary landing due to a low fuel state, one involved the fuel tank
unporting when the pilot maneuvered at low attitude with a low fuel state,
one had a bad header tank, and one pilot failed to select his reserve tank
when the main tank ran dry. Three cases of extremely low fuel, two of some
amount of fuel. In the remaining 24 cases, the engines quit because the
pilot used up all his or her usable fuel (one case included a leaking fuel
tank). That would still leave several gallons aboard each aircraft.

In ~660 accidents, then, the airplane crashed with sufficient fuel on board
to have enabled continued flight. I personally don't think a fuel-dump
valve would have helped in most of these cases. But I suspect it's like
the ballistic parachute argument; if you need one, then you REALLY need
one. :-)

Let's not rule out the one advantage of the fuel dump we haven't
discussed - that anyone who had to deadstick in due to fuel starvation
could then claim he had dumped the fuel to prepare for the deadstick
landing. Sure, he'd have some 'splainin' to do when the beast fires
right up when resupplied with go-juice, but he could always pull a
Unka BOb and claim it was just one of those evil intermittent auto
engine systems.

Mark Hickey