Originally Posted by
dublinpilot
BPF,
I am in no way critising what you are doing. You are doing far more than any instructor that I ever had, and I'm sure more than most instructors, so you are to be commended for that.
But could I respectfully suggest that you consider extending your fuel checks to getting the student to estimate the fuel remaining onboard after landing. I mean that they work this out afterwards taking into account any time difference from planned time, not that they try to estimate before the flight.
I say this becaues for me, this was when I really started to have confidence in fuel calculations. Leaning consistantly, flying consistant performance figures, I can not pretty much know how much fuel I have onboard to within 5 litres (from a 183ltr tank). This really improved my confidence in fuel planning.
I suppose the only downside is that someday it might encourage someone to push the limits of their fuel if they have too much confidence in the fuel level, but it's more likely to prevent someone pushing on hoping that they reserve they included lasts a bit longer.
dp
I did not express myself very well in the quote above. My comment that the student estimate the fuel
before fill ups was meant to be exactly what you are talking about but in the context of fueling the aircraft. This may be hard to do in the flight school environment but anytime the airplane will be filled after our flight I make a point of having the student make an estimate of what it will take based on what we started with and how long we flew, and then compare that estimate to the actual uplift.
To carry that further one could dip the tanks after every flight. I have never really considered this as a regular practice but your point has got me thinking and I am now reconsidering how/when to incorporate this idea into flying training.
Thanks for the feedback.
On a similar vein one pet peeve of mine is flight schools mindless passing on of the mantra that light aircraft fuel gauges are useless so they should just be ignored. My personal experience is that many of the Piper Cessna gauges are not particularly accurate at higher values but once they get down to a third or below they are usually quite close to the true value and low fuel indications on the fuel gauge should always be respected. But here again if you regularly fly the same 2 or 3 rental airplanes it is easy to make a note of where the gauges sit in comparison to the dip stick readings and get a good feel for what the fuel gauges are actually saying for all level levels not just low quantities.