Don’t tolerate fuel gauges that don’t tell you how much fuel you have.Robert Losurdo, who owns the flight instruction company that Greenwald was working for, told the Tampa Bay Times that he’s convinced that Greenwald would never have intentionally asked the Aerostar to be loaded with Jet A.Īccording to the NTSB’s preliminary factual report on the accident, “the airport employee who fueled the airplane, he asked the pilot of N326CW, while on approach to the airport, if he wanted jet fuel, and the pilot said ‘yes.’ When the airplane arrived, the employee pulled the Jet A fuel truck out and parked it in front of the airplane while the pilot was still inside the airplane. With anything this safety-critical, you should have multiple means of cross-checking. Too many general aviation accidents result from fuel mismanagement. At that point, the fact that the needles point to zero will be little consolation. Without working fuel gauges you might not know it-until the tanks are empty. But what if you made a mistake in the measurement or the calculation? What if you forgot to secure a fuel cap and now you’re venting fuel? What if the engine is burning more fuel than usual? Even if you have a fuel totalizer, it could be miscalibrated or it could have an incorrect starting fuel amount. You measured the amount of fuel on board before flight, calculated your fuel burn, and determined how long you could fly for, including the required fuel reserve. Then there’s the common sense safety issue. The new FAR 23.2430 says that fuel systems must provide the flightcrew with a means to determine the total usable fuel available. In 2017, FAR 23 was rewritten, eliminating that wording. This immediately followed FAR 23.1337(b), which stated that there must be a means to indicate to the flightcrew members the quantity of usable fuel in each tank during flight. An indicator that’s only accurate when the tanks are empty doesn’t satisfy that requirement. But zero usable fuel isn’t the only time they’re required to be accurate. FAR 23.1337(b)(1) stated that each fuel quantity indicator must be calibrated to read ‘zero’ during level flight when the quantity of fuel remaining in the tank is equal to the unusable fuel supply. In other words, fuel gauges should be calibrated in terms of remaining usable fuel. The common misconception originates from the pre-2017 version of FAR 23 for aircraft certification. If the tanks are half full, a gauge that reads empty is not doing its FAR 91.205 mandated job. FAR 91.205 says that a fuel gauge indicating the quantity of fuel in each tank is required equipment.
“Common sense would suggest this isn’t true, and, in fact, it isn’t.
0 kommentar(er)
