All my contacts with other PPLs suggest that fuel management is poorly addressed in PPL training, and my own experience confirms this. .....PPL training practices err on the safe side and most flying is done with the mixture set to fully-rich and few pilots are taught about leaning. Much reliance is placed on using ground based logs of flight times to determine the remaining fuel on board (FOB); this generally works because conservative fuel consumption figures are used and most training flights are short. The downside of this system is that a large part of the aeroplane's real range is not available and a pilot wishing to embark on a long flight is venturing into unfamiliar territory, and quite spectacular fuel planning related incidents do
happen.
Peter, TVM for the link to your article, very interesting, particularly your first paragraph. I think your first sentence says it all. Maybe Civilian FTOs ought to take a look at RAF training (yes, even PPL RAF training as I am doing) and see how we are taught. it may seem archaic and unnecessary, but my instructor really bangs on about fuel planning, so I am incredibly aware of checking it all the time. Indeed, he also points out your point of reliance for Plogs - on the basic form, there is no place for fuel planning - ok, so you have "fuel consumption, total required, fuel on board, reserve and total endurance" but that tells you nothing IMHO. I would rather work it out for each leg or twice for a leg if a long one, so I know when to divert if I need to.
Am I not correct in thinking the aircraft's real range is in the POH? Talking of the POH, yes, fuel consumption is in there, yes, in our case certainly they are about 30 years old, but that is at least a guide. The wise pilot surely also checks the fuel gauge en route...
but using time rather than fuel state.
Absolutely GtE, Maybe I forgot to mention in my original post that these fuel circles are based, as well as consumption, on the time it takes for the Grob to fly a certain distance and the amount of fuel it uses for that leg. For instance, we burn 25 litres per hour and therefore 2 litres every minutes. Therefore in my example in 25 minutes we have burnt 10 litres, in 18 minutes 8 litres etc. Of course some figures are rounded up or down, and you may use an extra litre per leg or less than planned but you will always have an idea in your mind of how much you are using, and perhaps more importantly, how much you need to return to base.
Are pilots who use GPS so aware of how much fuel they are using? Would you know that you should not do that extra leg because you would not get back to base?
Agree with A&C re fuel planning. I was trained as an FI with fuel circles and that's what I teach my students as all the proprietrary plogs are woeful as fuel planners.
Nice one India-Mike, I agree with you both on that!
How do other FI's instruct their students wrt Fuel planning?