Older readers will remember with great affection the marvellous authorship of Macarthur (Mac) Job when he was in DCA as editor of the flight safety magazine free to all licenced pilots - Aviation Safety Digest. Having trawled Ops shops and answered Trading Post advertisements over the years - as well as furtively lifted a few from dark and dusty corners in long gone flying school club houses - I have a whole library of these sought after mags at home.
In those days before cost recovery, Mac Job's flight safety magazines did not need pages of advertisements to pay for publication and this meant each page was full of good gen. Todays CASA's flight safety magazine is another story of glossy pictures and self promotion, leaving not a lot of room for a well thought out story. In the old days one pored over each page of Aviation Safety Digest. Now one flicks through the funnies and the ads and the quizzes until something interesting in the way of flight safety turns up. Of course FSA has to pay for itself nowadays.
As we grow older, policeman look younger and so do the captains of Virgin Blue and the regionals. Few younger generation pilots have ever heard of Aviation Safety Digests. Yet the stories and accidents are timeless and the reason for aircraft accidents haven't changed much. So I thought it would be a nice idea to occasionally include in Pprune some brief accident reports from the old days directly from Aviation Safety Digests - for the new pilots coming up the line.
Now most of us have flown the venerable Cessna 150 in our career and we know the fuel cock is prone to jamming on. CASA know this too and issued an AD I think some years ago about the need to exercise the fuel valve to stop it binding and finally jamming on completely. That is because just about every flying school and C150 owner never turn off the fuel cock at the end of a flight. Same with lots of GA types. Maybe it is sheer apathy or a perception that it is unnecessary and will wear out the part. In fact there was one incident where the Cessna 150 engine caught fire on start and the pilot could not turn off the fuel cock because it was jammed irrevocably on.
So here is a report from my dusted off June 1966 issue of Aviation Safety Digest - page 25. It is as valid now as it was then:
A Beech Bonanza was on downwind for landing when the engine lost power. The instructor directed the pupil (don't you love it? In those days we called 'em "pupils" - not "students") to change tanks and to work the wobble pump to restore fuel pressure but from his seat he could not see exactly what the student was doing and the engine surged two or three times then stopped.
The instructor then made an approach onto a recreation ground that was the only forced landing area available. The aircraft touched down hard and slid into a fence, injuring the instructor.
Examination of the aircraft showed that the fuel selector was positioned to the empty starboard tank which had been only partially full at the start of the flight. The port tank was still full. It was found that another instructor had previously given the pupil an erroneous briefing on the fuel selector in this particular aircraft, he having told the pupil that the long end of the selector indicated the tank. Although this was the case with selectors fitted to certain other models of this type of aircraft, the reverse was true for this particular aircraft.
The comment by the Australian Dept of Civil Aviation was as follows:
"Confusion over the correct positioning of fuel tank selectors has been responsible for a number of accidents to light aircraft in Australia. Earlier this year a Piper Cherokee was force-landed at Goulburn when the engine failed simply because the pilot wasn't familiar with the operation of the fuel selector fitted to that aircraft. One of the contributing causes to incidents of this sort is that some student pilots are seldom required to operate the fuel selector in the normal course of their training. Flying training periods are usually less than one hour and a number of flying schools and aircraft operators have regretfully adopted the practice of leaving the fuel turned on when their aircraft are not in use - a practice, incidently, which contributes nothing towards inculculating sound cockpit habits in students, and which could have undesirable effects when the pilots graduate to more advanced aircraft with multi-selection fuel systems.
The only practicable answer to the overall problem is a twofold one. Flying instructors must place greater emphasis on briefing both students and qualified pilots obtaining endorsement training on the layout and operation of the fuel system of the particular aircraft they are flying and all pilots must ensure they fully understand their aircraft's fuel system before they attempt any solo flights." Unquote.
So there you have it from 1966. Turn off the fuel cocks at the end of each flight. - In the Cessna 150 this practice may prevent potential jamming of the fuel valve in the long run.
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