I'm glad MJ mentioned the silliness of doing the run-up, then changing to the other tank just before take-off. It's something I've seen and shaken my head over. A similar no-thought routine is to turn off the electric fuel pump (if you have one) with the 300' (or so) P&T scan, assuming you're flying a typical SEP with no fancy recommended procedures. It's about the worst place to discover your engine-driven fuel pump is in trouble and I've often thought that these guys would be better with no auxiliary pump running at all: at least that way they might discover the problem earlier.
For normal operation I've always operated C172s with the fuel selector in the 'both' position but I quite liked the approach of one operator I encountered who required the selector to be set to the 'off' position on shutdown, just so his students learned not to be afraid of the selector and routinely got the feel of the forces involved. He commented that it was one step in the learning process for students trained on C150s, where the selector was wired on and required a determined action to turn off the fuel.
I wouldn't mind having a 'both' position on my P2002JF but the certification process somehow managed to lose that feature of the LSA P2002S. It's no big deal but, with a VLA and decent in–trim flying standards, 15 min tank changes are in order.
Last edited by tecman; 8th Jul 2015 at 08:30.