How Armchair Quarterbacking Makes You Look Like An Idiot

[Trey Kule]

If you are not smart enough to claim they seemed to be working fine before you took off, you deserve to be blamed....

[Colonel]

Many old aircraft that Chuck and I fly don't have gas gauges.

Popular is the cork with a rod that goes up and down through
the gas cap, in front of the windscreen.

Sights are also common, both external and internal.  Here's
a Stearman (external, downwards):

[img]http://m.aircraftspruce.com/cache/370-3 ... /10435.jpg[/img]

Ryan had an external sight, upwards - sort of a high speed
cork arrangement.

Heck, the Pitts has some silly plastic tube down in the cockpit
where you can't see it, filled with an unreadable mixture of gas
and bubbles.  I remember instructing on Murphy Rebels that
had the same arrangement, but at the wing root.

None of the above could possibly be reasonably construed as a "gauge".

[Eric Janson]

[quote author=JW Scud link=topic=7894.msg21859#msg21859 date=1517802313]
[quote author=Colonel Sanders link=topic=7894.msg21857#msg21857 date=1517800210]
  How about the fuel leak with the Azores
glider?  Is there anything there you could learn from?

[/quote]

Plenty to learn, don't open up the crossfeed, especially when the checklist says: don't open the crossfeed if you have the indications of a fuel leak.
[/quote]

The airbus fuel leak procedure was completely revised after this event.

The correct way to identify a fuel leak is to add up fuel used plus fuel remaining - we have this information available to us on the airbus.

Tank quantities can fluctuate - not unusual to be 'missing' 7-800 kg of fuel only to get it back later in the flight.

At my former company there was a mishandled fuel leak on an A330 over the Bay of Bengal where an engine wasn't shut down (which would have closed the fuel valve located in the engine pylon and stopped the leak). They were close enough to the destination that they made it before running out of fuel - this would have resulted in a ditching had they been further out.

This serious incident does not appear on the local CAA website - it was all covered up.

Back on Topic

If I remember correctly Sully was also initially criticised for not trying to make it to another airport instead of ditching. Only much later in the investigation was the correctness of his decision acknowledged.

In this Business:-

If you get away with it - you're clever.
If you don't get away with it - you're stupid.

[Colonel]

[quote]The airbus fuel leak procedure was completely revised after this event[/quote]

and that somehow proves that the crew were too stupid
to reproduce, as the internet experts assert?


[quote]Sully was also initially criticised[/quote]

yeah, people forget that pretty quickly, don't they?

Armchair quarterbacks are useless assholes.  TC
is full of them.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

The PBY is a transport category airplane and they do not have fuel gauges, fuel is monitored by how much you put in it and then by dipping the two tanks with a dipstick.


That worked for me for over four and a half thousand hours flying them and a lot of the flying was transoceanic.

My longest non stop flight was nineteen hours and ten minutes.

By the way it holds just under eleven thousand pounds of fuel and nine hundred pounds of oil in the oil tanks.


And it is real heavy on the controls and I never flew one with an autopilot in it.

[JW Scud]

[quote author=Colonel Sanders link=topic=7894.msg21886#msg21886 date=1517884754]
[quote]The airbus fuel leak procedure was completely revised after this event[/quote]

and that somehow proves that the crew were too stupid
to reproduce, as the internet experts assert?

[/quote]

Perhaps it was revised. I suppose in the beginning, they never thought that someone would be foolish enough to open a crossfeed to a tank that had fuel mysteriously disappearing and the total quantity quickly decreasing(keep in mind that the checklist at the time said not to open the crossfeed for a leaking tank anyways). The imbalance was 3000kg low on one side according to the report. How does one get a sudden 3 ton imbalance? Extra fuel burn on one side after several hours of near even fuel flow? All this done way out over the ocean. When fuel is disappearing from one side, do whatever you can to keep the fuel on the other side from going over to the faulty side.

While the checklist in an airliner will cover this, common sense applies as well.

From the incident report of the guy who won an award(and he certainly has demonstrated superior flying skills).

9. The crew did not correctly evaluate the situation before taking action.
10. The flight crew did not recognize that a fuel leak situation existed and carried out the fuel imbalance procedure from memory, which resulted in the fuel from the left tanks being fed to the leak in the right engine.
11. Conducting the FUEL IMBALANCE procedure by memory negated the defence of the Caution note in the FUEL IMBALANCE checklist that may have caused the crew to consider timely actioning of the FUEL LEAK procedure.
12. Although there were a number of other indications that a significant fuel loss was occurring, the crew did not conclude that a fuel leak situation existed – not actioning the FUEL LEAK procedure was the key factor that led to the fuel exhaustion.


Now, somebody might trim or balance fuel for a few hundred kilos but for 3 tons appearing in a short time period?
P.S. I believe the F/O may have been trying to convince the captain not to do this but I am not sure.

[John Swallow]

Andrew:

Have you ever been a member of an Accident Investigation Board? 

[Colonel]

Unfortunately my frontal lobes are still intact, so that
closes the door for me for a career with TC or the
Tribunal, or the TSB.  I don't have a charming collection
of cute socks so being PM is out, too.

Back on topic: I spent many thousands of hours giving
very challenging flight instruction over many years - with
a perfect safety record.

Not once did I tell the student:  [b]Hey, be less stupid[/b]

Why was that?  What was lacking from my flight instruction
technique that is so obvious to the self-proclaimed internet
expert geniuses, who opine that if everyone was as bright
as they were, there would be no accidents?

Thanks for that constructive input.  That's really helpful.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

I wonder why you and I are such outsiders in aviation when it comes to TCCA?


It would appear that we both have a very successful history of being able to teach the art of flying but neither of us are accepted by the power brokers in TCCA.


Any idea why?

[Colonel]

The FAA despised Bob Hoover, for some odd reason.

Pity, i never had one tenth of his skill.