Don't Cessna 172's have fuel gauges?

[Guest Clunkmeister]

Let me rephrase Ern.. You'd not catch me dead in a flight school cessna!

And they actually sell them when they're done with them to real live suckers, I mean people.

[red Dog]

Aren't pilot taught not to trust fuel gauges?

Maybe that was taken a bit too literally :)

[Cap'n Wannabe]

Damn! If he'd been Down Under, he'd be hung, drawn and quartered for that..

[Rainer Hoffmann]

Damn! If he'd been Down Under, he'd be hung, drawn and quartered for that..

 

Yep, running out of fuel is a capital offense...

 

From what he said I had the impression he didn't acknowledge that it was his fault.

 

Cheers

Rainer

[TonyT]

Problem with the 172 is the gauges are not reliable and hence it needs dipping, and if it has bag tanks they are even worse, as they get folds in them and you can have water issues.

[Hubert Boillot]

Even with strong headwinds and a heavy load, running out of fuel in one hour when you expect 2 1/2 autonomy is strange...something must have gone wrong, but he does not appear to have understood he is also responsible, and did not react properly to understand the issue. Not that it would have made much of a difference on subsequent actions ...

 

This said, it's so easy to be a chair pilot ...

 

Hubert, the chair pilot

[Guest Clunkmeister]

Aviation "experts" are a dime a dozen these days with the advent of recent PC sim programs.

But all the PC sim flying in the world, shooting imaginary ILS approaches, and whatever else, doesn't mean a thing when it's YOUR arse in the seat and you have 20 tons following around behind you. Or even a 172, where if you screw up, you can't hit reset.

 

I don't have many hours in 172s, for good reason. They're a decent enough local flyer I suppose, but I once made a trip back to The Pas, Thompson, Gillam, and Churchill in one to visit buddies still working up there.  That was a really, really stupid idea. Hundreds of miles from anywhere, in a rented flight school 172 with (and this dating me), a panel full of those wonderful old Cessna branded avionics. Never again.

When you have nothing but lakes and treetops to choose from for your emergency landing area, you really miss that second engine.

[FunkyZeit]

Amen to that Ern!

[TonyT]

 

When you have nothing but lakes and treetops to choose from for your emergency landing area, you really miss that second engine.

 

 

On a lot of light twins, the second engine is simply there to deliver you to the crash site.

[ChuckD]

Funny story...

 

I was flying a C-182RG from Michigan to middle Wisconsin to visit relatives in college.  Nice long IFR cross country in and out of the clouds all the way.  On most Cessnas I've flown the fuel selector lets you select the right tank, left tank, or both for your fuel source.  On the selector itself, there is a placard that says something like "for level flight only" on the setting for the right or left individual tanks.  Generally, you set the selector to "both" and leave it that way.  However, this ragged, beat up (over 9000 hours last I saw her 10 years ago) rental C182 had a bit of a quirk.  With the selector set to both, it would draw fuel significantly faster from one tank over, leading to a pretty severe wing-heavy situation after several hours of flight.  To combat this, it was common knowledge around the ramp that when taking her for long flights, you needed to select individual tanks.  So, somewhere along the way to WI, I switched it to the one of the tanks individually and every hour, switched it to the other individual tank to help draw the fuel load evenly.

 

Tooling happily along, I started my decent as I neared my destination.  At one point, still many miles out an in a general descent in VFR conditions, I realized I had quite a few thousand feet of altitude to burn before I'd arrive at pattern altitude.  To counter this, I'd often put the aircraft into a slip which more or less exposes the side of the fuselage to the slipstream, slows you down, and allows you to descend quickly without gaining too much airspeed.  I'd done this hundreds of times before without problem.

 

But those times, I'd remembered to leave the fuel selector on "both."

 

Shortly after I began the slip, the fuel in the tank I had selected was pulled by centripetal force away from the tank's intake pipe and the engine immediately quit.  It was like someone threw a switch.  In the gun hobby, there's a saying: "the two loudest sounds in the world; a click when there should be a bang, and bang when there should be a click."  This would be the aviation equivalent.  The relative silence was deafening.  One second, the big, beefy 6-cylinder Lycoming was humming away as it had for hours, singing its low pitched song.  The next, the the only sound that filled the cabin was the metallic clatter and shudder of thousands of precision parts windmilling in the slipstream.  It was unlike any sound I've ever heard and is still clear in my mind.  

 

In a second, I snapped back to coordinated flight which quickly put the fuel back over the intake pipe in the tank.  The windmilling engine immediately caught and resumed it's monotonous hum as my trembling hands reached down to switch the selector to both.

 

Turns out those "for level flight only" placards are there for a reason.  

[Juggernut]

I wonder if the guy forgot to lean the mixture after takeoff and consequently burned more gas than he should've? 

[TonyT]

Yup, aviation has one 100% record, and that is we have never left one up there.

[sassgrunt]

I don't normally contribute, but the irony of this incident is just too coincidental to what happened to me NOT to.  It was around 1969 and I was about 15 years old and living on Bolling Air Force Base in Washington DC.  A family friend was a member of a local flying club, and spent some weekends out flying for the day in the Virginia area; trying to build up his hours towards getting an instructor's license.  My mother knew his wife pretty well, and she asked if I would like to go out flying with him on a Saturday.  (And at 15, I absolutely jumped at the chance)!

 

We went to the airfield and he let me follow him around as he did the preflight.  It was a white and green Cessna 172, and had the registration number of N4666, (or maybe there were four 6's - I just remember he identified the aircraft on the radio as "N - Triple Six" and thought that was pretty cool).  Total flight time was around 7 hours, and we stopped at one airport for lunch and then another one about a half-hour away from the home airport, so that he could refuel before turning in the aircraft.

 

Right after we took off from that last airport, he told me that the direction-finder (is that the IFR?) had stopped working, and that we would have to find the airport visually.  I guess he knew the general direction we had to go, and he said it was next to a lake, so we'd just have to fly around and compare the lakes we could see to what was shown on the aeronautical map we had.  The weather was great that day, so it shouldn't be too hard, right?

 

We'd probably only been flying for 10 minutes or so, and were at 3,500 feet; when the engine sputtered and stopped.  He didn't panic at all - just started gliding down in a big spiral towards a plowed-up field he had spotted.  I remember him asking me if the field below us looked like it had a fence that was very high.  I didn't think so and told him that, but when we landed it turned out that I hadn't even been looking at the right field!

 

I was amazed at how smooth the landing was; considering that the field had been recently plowed up.  He checked the fuel tanks in the wing, and said they were completely dry!  He guessed that when we'd filled up just a few minutes earlier, the guy who fuels it didn't screw on the cap very well; and that it (they?) had vibrated loose and the fuel was all just sucked out.  He walked up to the farm and came back in the farmer's pickup with a 5-gallon can of gasoline, (which he said wasn't aviation fuel but would still work).

 

He fueled the plane, and we turned around and taxied to the gravel road coming in from the split two-lane highway.  We waited for the traffic coming from the left side to pass, and then taxied in the center gravel area between the two paved sides.  We waited for that traffic to go by, and then it was clear enough to taxi onto the paved two-lane road.  I remember people from the farm across the other side of the highway lined up on the fence watching us, and thinking that I had to try and look as cool and relaxed as he did.

 

We started accelerating (and getting a lot closer to those cars that had gone by) and he started to lift off the ground.  And - there was a phone line going right across the road, so he put it right back down; and we were REALLY getting close to that last car!  Well, right in front of us was a set of high tension line towers that stretched across the road, with one of the towers in the grassy median in between the roads.  I figured he would fly under it, but maybe there wasn't enough room for the wing to clear; because he puled it up so hard that I was pressed down into the seat a lot.  I saw the wires go by under the wheel pant that was right outside my window SO CLOSE that I couldn't believe we hadn't hit them.

 

He had compared our map with whatever the farmer had, (or maybe the farmer just knew what direction and how far the airport was), and we got there within just a few minutes.  We landed and he fueled it up, and turned it in with the notation that the direction finder wasn't working.  He made me promise not to say anything about it, and I never did.  I figured that it would maybe screw up his getting his instructor's license, but I KNEW that if my mother found out about it, she'd never let me go with him again!  Turns out that I never did, but not because I wouldnt have wanted to.

 

About 10 years later, I bought a Nichimo 1/20 scale Cessna 172 kit, and always figured I'd build it to match that airplane.  Still haven't done that, but the whole thing was such a unique experience (and also to have survived it) that I really should.  Anyway, thank you for allowing me to share this with you, and sorry for being so long-winded about it.  I just thought the coincidence was cool.  -Mike

Edited June 14, 2017 by sassgrunt

[ChuckD]

Holy hell.  I'll be the first to admit that I've made mistakes in airplanes and have had the good fortune to walk away with myself and [most of] the airplane intact.  But that guy just kept piling up the mistakes.  Yikes.  Great story though.  Thanks for sharing. 

[TonyT]

Many moons ago a new build Cessna 172 set off  on the way to the EUrope and If i remember this was the result

 

 

https://support.cessna.com/custsupt/contacts/pubs/ourpdf.pdf?as_id=17543

 

Having refuelled in Greenland or Iceland for the leg across to the UK he started up and set off, some time into the trip he noticed excessive fuel useage so elected to turn back, I seem to remember being told that on finals the engine quit and he managed to dead stick it onto the runway... cause, on start up the engine and cowls rock and it sheared the pipe off, resulting in fuel pouring overboard.