Page 15 - Volume 18 Number 1

Right Warning
Right
My personal minimum is one full hour’s fuel remaining, including flight to an alternate. If at any point the fuel totalizer or my calculations indicate I won’t have at least an hour’s fuel remaining when I land, I start looking for options right away—landing early for fuel or reducing power to lower the fuel burn rate and reach destination with my reserve fuel intact. In other words, my reserve is not only required for planning purposes, but in flight as well.
Failure to recognize and act on that personal extension of the fuel reserve requirement may be what gets some pilots in trouble.
The King Air pilot departed on a roughly one-hour flight with only enough fuel on board to fly 42 minutes—slightly less than half the minimum fuel required. Surely he did not plan to run out of gas, with fatal consequences. The NTSB will not release its final report for many months, so we don’t yet know much about what led up to this fuel exhaustion event...if we ever learn. This crash does remind us that “little airplane” problems like fuel management and fuel exhaustion apply to Twin & Turbine-type airplanes as well. So, why do pilots attempt to stretch their fuel beyond its limit? How do we fall into the trap of fuel starvation? More importantly, how do we escape the trap?
Some contributing factors to fuel exhaustion crashes include:
Cost. Many fuel-related crashes occur within sight of the intended destination airport, often the aircraft’s home base. Online and uplinked information make us much more informed consumers, frequently picking our destinations based on reported fuel price. Most owners get a substantial “home base” fuel discount, so there’s a financial incentive to tank up with the lower-cost “home base fuel.”
Convenience (part 1). It’s a hassle to fuel an airplane, especially away from home. Some pilots don’t want to get involved if they can avoid it.
Convenience (part 2). It’s a major inconvenience to make a fuel stop en route, especially to land within an hour or 100 miles or so of your destination, even if your calculations or totalizer say you’ll burn into your fuel reserves.
No fuel SOPs. Long ago, FLYING Magazine’s Richard Collins wrote that “the problem is not that pilots follow bad procedures, it’s that they have no procedure at all.” There are few more obvious needs for Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) than fuel management.
Totalizer dependence. Fuel totalizers are a tremendous boon to fuel management. But, like any other computer, they require accurate entries of known, observed fuel levels. And they do not account for siphoning, leaks, or fuel forced overboard by return-fuel
JANUARY 2014
TWIN & TURBINE • 13