I had a chat with a guy today who nearly had a double engine failure in a seneca (estimated 5 minutes of fuel remaining) due to crossfeed mismanagement, even though one tank was virtually full....scary isn't it?
Actually, a plane ended up doing a forced landing, not a million miles away from the subject of this thread, with one empty tank and one not very empty one... put this together with how often I've walked up to a (rented) PA28 and found virtually nothing in the tank (which itself is clear negligence on the previous pilot's part), people seem to do this quite a lot.
While I believe you could almost teach an ape to fly straight and level, most people out of an average population sample would not get through the PPL exams. Pilots aren't stupid, and most of them are pretty clever. This neurosurgeon has got to be highly intelligent... a 6 year degree+postgrad equivalent?
So, why does it happen? It's got to be the barmy training, and the people on the ground who allow it to happen. When I pointed out to a CFI (probably after my very first lesson) that the system of relying on multiple subtractions to work out the remaining fuel is highly prone to errors, he said it's maintained in two places (a tech log for the plane, and a flight log which has a line per flight) and "if the two agree, it's ok". The holes in this are too obvious to spell out...
It indeed appears that legally it is OK for the pilot to rely on these "records". I wonder what this will do for the CAA policy of prosecuting people who run out of fuel? I bet many/most of them did rely on the paper records to start with.
And all of them could moan about the system which teaches them to do fuel calculations with a ex-WW1 slide rule - a jury would roll over laughing if they heard about that. It's OK for those oldies among us who know how a slide rule works (adding/subtracting logs etc) but for later generations this is just another counter-intuitive way to get into a mess.