A student pilot and flight instructor are planning a flight to a nearby airport to practice takeoffs and landings. The aircraft, a Piper Super Cub, has been moved from the hangar to the ramp and is to be fueled for the flight.
The expectation that these preliminaries have been attended to is reinforced by the sight of a fuel truck parked near the airplane. But that deceptive appearance of things is actually the first link in a short chain that will lead to an off-airport landing in about an hour.
Here’s the second link in that chain. The student pilot performs a preflight inspection during which he satisfies himself—without a visual inspection of the tanks—that the fuel sight gauges are indicating full fuel.
The flight instructor arrives at the airplane post-preflight and asks how much fuel is on board. The student replies that the tanks are full. The student was not directly observed performing the preflight—not doing so is a common instructor practice which, if usually reasonable, now forms the next link in the chain.
“The flight departed from Lynchburg, Virginia, and made several takeoffs and landings at a nearby airport. About one hour into the flight as the airplane was 1,000 feet above ground level, the engine lost all power,” said a National Transportation Safety Board summary of the accident that occurred in Campbell County, Virginia, on February 4, 2015.
“As the instructor began a turn toward a nearby pasture, the engine started producing power again and the instructor chose to continue the turn, heading toward the nearest airport. The engine then lost all power again. No longer able to glide to the nearby pasture, the instructor flew the airplane straight ahead and let it settle into the trees.”
The airplane struck trees and terrain and came to rest inverted. The 22-year-old student pilot was taken to a hospital with minor injuries. The CFI was not injured.
When the FAA inspected the airplane, “the inspector recovered about one pint of fuel from each fuel tank,” the NTSB said. It attributed the accident to inadequate preflight inspection by both the student pilot and the flight instructor, resulting in fuel exhaustion.
There is an adage introduced to students—often during the first demonstration of a preflight inspection—that fuel gauges are famously unreliable and a visual check is the only sure means of confirming a full indication. Any gauge reading between full and empty requires a more comprehensive form of measurement to eliminate guesswork about a flight’s fuel condition.
As noted, it is something of a flight training rite of passage, barring any flight-school-specific prohibition on the practice, that when a student pilot is considered competent to perform a preflight inspection, it becomes one of the first piloting tasks that he or she is permitted to perform without direct supervision. It’s a confidence builder, when viewed in its most positive context.
Still, no flight instructor would walk up to an airplane and jump in without a glance as to its condition—at least checking for unremoved gust locks and pitot covers, undetached tiedown ropes, or wheel chocks. And as the NTSB noted, the CFI inquired about the fuel condition; the question not asked was whether the full fuel tanks had been visually observed.
Every cloud has its silver lining, and because the accident flight was associated with an academic institution’s aeronautics program, lessons learned from the mishap were widely shared.
The NTSB reported that the institution followed up by holding safety briefings with its instructors, faculty, and students, including “discussion of the circumstances of the accident, and the implementation of policy changes related to pre- and postflight responsibilities of students and instructors.”
New procedures for measuring fuel were implemented, as were dispatch records of fuel status across “all airplane types and operations at the school, and were subsequently written in the flight operations manual.”
For the rest of us, the core lesson for avoiding this type of fuel management accident boils down to a simple idea: If a visual check of the fuel load has not been made, the aircraft’s airworthiness is still undetermined.
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