Superfill Procedure
 

Hey guys,

Anyone know anything about this, can't find anything on the web or pprune. Believe its about using cold fuel with a high S.G. to make the most of the tank capacity. Can anyone elucidate further?

On the 737 on charters to Cyprus, some guys would ask for a fuel bowser that hadn't been sitting in the sun all day. Fresh from an underground storage, with condensation on the bowser was the preference. Cold fuel does have a higher density, slightly, than warm, so you can get more mass into a given volume. If you have say 22500 litres of tanks available, then at 0.8 sg thats 18000kg of fuel. At 0.79 it's only 17775 kg. I know it's only 225 kg, but it's enough to make quite a difference. I've had several instances this year when this is a enough to have to use a different destination for fuel planning purposes.
A short taxi, directs and contingency fuel then then sometimes compensate for the initial shortfall and you are able to make your planned destination without a tech stop. (Remembering that in the UK no dealy can mean 20 minutes in the hold. Binning your alternate is sometimes allowable as well.)

A good technique if you're being pushed into the cormers of max fuel capacity rather than max weights, but not always available.

When the first Qantas B744 was delivered to SYD, it routed via LHR. It was then filled with specially produced high SG fuel by Shell, and was then towed to the holding point.
It then flew non-stop LHR-SYD.
It would not have worked with fuel out of the hydrant.

We used to use a superfill procedure endorsed by airbus to enable our 346's to get to JFK.