Fuel Gauges

[MaximumPete]

I've just been looking through some back numbers of one of the weekly magazines are there appears to be an over reliance on fuel gauges.

Don't pilots and engineers carry out "gross error checks" anymore?

I'm a great believer in periodically carrying out "gross error checks" of contents as they appear on the gauges against what appears to have used and what you think should have been used.

Two incidents involving fatalities would have been totally avoidable if these checks had been carried out.

Check, or get the engineer to check, at the beginning of the day physically how much is on board the aircraft. The types involved have facilities to either drip stick or dip-stick the tanks. I'm not talking about Airbus and wide-body Boeings but your smaller twin jets and turbo-props.

Remember that the little round clock on the instrument panel that looks very basic. Behind the dial there may be a mini-rack of electronics approximately 15-20cm to make it work.

It can also go Wrong!

Safe Flying

MP:)

[mono]

Surely every refuel involves an error check!!

Uplift in litres/gallons, guage in kgs/lbs. Convert volume to weight, add to residual fuel figure, check guage reads what it is expected to read. Any significant error then drip the tanks.

If that's not done every fuel-up then someone is asking for trouble.

[MaximumPete]

You've got it in one but unfortunately occassionally this doesn't happen, sod's law takes over and......

MP:)

[leftright]

I have a little spreadsheet in my PDA which I use for just these Ramp fuel checks, lovely things these PDA's with spreadsheets.

[Swedish Steve]

Surely every refuel involves an error check!!

Yes. We always work out that the fuel remaining on arrival by calculation from departure minus uplift is within 300kg for B737 up to 1000kg for B747 from the arrival fuel worked out from the flowmeters taken away from the last departure. If not off to the MFLIs. But be careful. The modern fuel system is accurate to 0.5%, while a dipstick is accurate to around 4%. With modern aircraft it is amazing how rare an error is.
You need some good conversion tables. Fuel is in litres or US gallons or UK gallons, and dipsticks are in lbs or kgs or inches or units, or litres, and do you add the outer cell in (A320 and Tristar) or not? There can be a lot of head scratching after a stick check!

[paco]

"With modern aircraft it is amazing how rare an error is."

Assuming it is calibrated properly in the first place!

phil

[matkat]

When I worked the line We always did an error check all IAW what Swedishsteve said used to get regularly very close 200-250KG was normal bearing in mind loads were usually at the 130,000KG mark not bad at all.