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I thought I would share a personal experience that
has affected my philosophy about how much gas I ACTUALLY have in my
tanks.
I was going to do a quick flight to test how a
modification to my cowl inlets would affect CHTs in a climb. There was no
fuel truck on the field and the tanks were at the other end of the field.
Don't remember exactly how much fuel I had in the tanks but it was fairly low -
around 7 to 8 gallons a side. Around 15 gallons or an hour of flight.
Rather than refueling I decided to take off for just a short flight - after all
I had an hour of fuel.
I took off and climbed up to about 5,000
ft. - CHTs were rock solid and low so I descended to land. In the
pattern at about 1,000 suddenly the sound of the engine
changed and I started to lose altitude. At first I wasn't sure what
had happened. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to switch tanks and
put on low boost. The sound of the engine changed again and I started to
climb from an altitude of less than 500 ft. I landed and after I
turned off the runway wiped away the sweat and tried to steady my
hands.
In retrospect, I made a bad/dumb/lazy decision to
take off with only 15 gallons. I had neglected to consider the difference
between total fuel and total usable fuel. Probably in the pattern I was
uncoordinated for a while and my pump started sucking air. I could have
become a statistic.
Lesson (for me) - never take off with less
than Unusable (approx 5 gallons) + 10
gallons = 15 gallons in each tank. And
while I agree that carrying too much fuel will degrade the performance of our
planes, too little is much worse.
D. Brunner
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2009 10:37
AM
Subject: [LML] Re: Fuel Planning
Gary,
Your analysis is interesting given that the leading cause of loss of
power accidents in the Lancair fleet is fuel exhaustion/ starvation.
Jeff
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