Ever since the incident of December 28 I have been unable to understand what happened. I know I had a full tank of gas (16 gal) which at the rate of 6 gal/ hour should have lasted 2.7 hours. I thought I had flown an hour and forty five mins. which should have left me plenty of gas. A check of the GPS indicated I had flown for 2.0. hours which should have left me nearly 3/4 gal of gas or 45 mins. of flight. But the tank WAS dry and no odor of gas was around the plane after the incident. That means I was using 16/2.03= 7 gal/hour actually used. A little high but enough to convince me I indeed ran out of gas!
The good news is that since I had no gas left I couldn't have burned to death.
Mea culpa. El stupido piloto.
Dick
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3 comments:
Hi Dick,
Could the gas have drained out since you where upside down?
Tom flew today for the first time in over 7 months. He was up with another pilot to check out one of the planes after some maintance. He said he just did 3 landings, but it felt like old hat to him.He is much brighter "eyed" today, it was good for his spirit.
Take care,
Maryanne
Flying always made me more 'alive' but I've decided that it's pushing my luck to fly so I'm done. Good for Tom though.
Always careful.
Dick
Hello Dick
This reminds me of the time in '65 when we were coming back from Big Bear headed for SNA/OC in a 65 HP J-3 Cub. I was a student pilot on the stick when she quit at 3500' AGL. Ran out of gas.... We were only about four miles from touch-down so the back-seater said, "Just stay the course until the final..." well he side-slipped and crabbed us in right over to the fuel truck without nary a hiccup. The Cub as you know has such a low sink-rate that it ended up being a relative piece of cake.
Needless to say he had his ticket pulled for 90 days....
In those yester-years if you wanted to buy gas on Sundays at Big Bear you were just SOL.... Instead of waiting till the next day we decided to chance it. Needless to say it could have cost us our skins. But the good Lord was watching over us as he must have been with you in your stubby-winged critter.
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