I understand that this aircraft has now been sold for salvage. What's the use in salvage of an aircraft of this age.? I can't imagine that there are many of these around now due to the high fuel expense and a cirrus will do the same speed on less than half the maintenance cost I imagine.!:hmm:

the human head weighs 8 pounds aswell. Which is about as significant.

I just meant would someone go to the bother of rebuilding something like this aircraft or what would you do with it.? I doubt there is much of a market for them thats all.....

Rebuild by someone with their own labour or cannibalism for parts? If the insurers' write off threshold was low enough, someone may think they can get it flying with a reasonable margin.

I'm not an engineer, but I would imagine that there would be a fair amount of commonality of parts for various models of Piper of similar vintage. For the rest, considering the amount of road signs going missing these days, the metal content alone has a value.:(

So long as the hull and the wings aren't bent, it can be repaired if the insurer sells it cheap enough (say under £10k).

The report is interesting for its scandalous disclosures of previously little-known gems like this

I always thought that this kind of knowledge ranked with masonic secrets, where the Nazi gold is stored, whether the US has UFO wreckage and alien bodies, and whether the NSA has found a way to rapidly factorise products of large primes :)

I would replace "many" with "practically all".

I can finally appreciate why the AAIB job adverts say you need to have an ATPL, which they will keep current for you.

It does amaze me (well actually it doesn't) that people are still doing "serious" flights like this, without a fuel totaliser linked to a GPS. The totaliser costs about £2k to install, less on an N-reg, and the IFR GPS you probably already have. Then you get a constantly recomputed "Landing FOB" figure. Then you know what you've got instead of relying on data in a decades-old POH.

The best fuel gauge in the world is usually a sight gauge - incredibly easy to design into any high wing aeroplane.

Hard on a low wing twin like this of-course, but would be dead easy on most Cessnas, for example. Most microlights do this because it's cheaper and more reliable and more accurate than anything electronic - presumably light aeroplane designers think that their customers want to pretend they're driving a car?

G

A sight gauge only tells you what you actually have, which is no good if you are enroute to somewhere and do not even know your precise fuel flow rate.

This is the system I refer to. It is very common in the better IFR tourers. I routinely land and fill up within 1-2% of the computed figure, and would never do my 900nm+ flights without it.

When I see bigger errors, it points to a pump which has been "adjusted" in favour of the airport, in a country where Weights & Measures inspectors are nonexistent ;) The biggest errors I have seen were ~ 5%, in Greece and Italy.

Anybody pushing to say 80% of their best dry-tank range, without this kind of equipment, is going to get their bum bitten eventually. Some stories I have heard have been truly scary, but the ones people talk about are the ones they got away with. Like one pilot who landed an old TB20 after a 1150nm flight with a few USG in the tanks.

I don't think many microlights do flight of significant distance, so they don't need to worry :)

Problem with many fuel totalizers are that they only count the fuel that goes to the engine. Many engines, like mine and other Lycomings, "overfeed" the engine and then has a fuel return that goes back into the tank for the stuff it doesn't use. So you need two measuring points, one additive and one subtractive - most totalizers don't do this.

That would be a useless and negligent installation.

I don't think most Lycos do this though. Mine doesn't. Conti engines tend to do it.

It's really not that hard, if you have an accurate fuel gauge, you just track fuel consumption on your PLOG along with time and distance.

Having done quite a few multi-hour microlight trips, I reckon to be accurate to within a couple of litres of what it'll be at any point forwards once I've been flying for half an hour or so.

A light aeroplane, with the well known dodgy fuel gauges, does require more guesswork, or the sort of system you're talking about.

G