Originally Posted by
Dan Winterland
The 744 tail tank is just somewhere to stuff extra fuel. It is not designed to be a trim tank as in the A330/340...
That's like saying "we just put the windshield on the plane to meet cert requirements - the pilots don't really need to see outside".
OF COURSE a stab tank will have CG trim implications as evidenced by the EICAS attention-getter. There must be some reason the stab tank is used only on extremely long flights; its ability to trim for optimum cruise CG seems to me to be an untapped (
) economy measure.