Several years ago, Flight Training discussed an accident in which an instructor allowed a Cessna 172 to run out of fuel on a short flight to practice pattern work at a neighboring airport (see “Not Quite Enough,” March 2010 Flight Training). That instructor subsequently emailed the editors to complain about this presentation of the story, maintaining that some unspecified mechanical failure must have caused the engine to quit. Maybe. But the airplane’s tanks were intact, the surrounding foliage showed no signs of staining or blight, and the amount of fuel recovered from the wreck was less than the quantity listed as “unusable” for that model.
In exactly the same vein, a helicopter instructor dismissed his student’s concerns about their fuel supply on a dual cross-country, only to have the engine quit two miles shy of their home field. The CFI wasn’t able to prevent main rotor rpm—the most critical variable in any helicopter emergency—from decaying below the threshold required for a stable autorotation, and the hard landing that resulted caused the main rotor to sever the tail boom. The CFI blamed the loss of rotor speed on a faulty sprag clutch, the mechanism designed to disengage the rotor system from the engine when the latter began to falter. Maybe. But an inspection afterward found nothing wrong with the clutch. And only unusable fuel was recovered from the wreckage.
It’s painful to acknowledge having goofed, but it might be the right thing to do. In 2014, Air Safety Institute staff spent a day with the senior staff of the National Transportation Safety Board discussing data quality and learning how the NTSB conducts its investigations. When an accident is serious, causing loss of life or major property damage, its process is rigorous and exacting. Every potential cause that can be eliminated is; the truth rests among those that remain. Less severe events get less concentrated attention, leaving room for interested parties to prevaricate.
When asked how AOPA could help, one field investigator—himself an AOPA member—responded, “Just ask people to tell the truth. If you admit you ran out of gas, we’ll save weeks of time and thousands of dollars we’d otherwise spend taking the aircraft apart to prove that nothing broke.” It might be even more public-spirited to save them all that trouble by not running out of fuel in the first place.
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