Plane Making Emergency Landing Hit By 3 Cars

[chefnoel]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090823/ap_on_re_us/us_plane_crash_freeway

[craigs1001]

Other than faulty gauges or a major leak, I can't think of ANY reason a pilot should let his plane run out of fuel.  This is insane yet it happens quite frequently.  A plane crashed two weeks ago in Augusta and as hard as it hit the highway, there was no fire.  Pilot report his engine had quit.  I wonder why?

[jonnevin]

GA plane fuel gauges are notoriously unreliable, no where near the precision instruments of an airliner.

This pilot was flying a Piper which requires fuel tank switching/management, this has led to many a crash.

All that being said, running out of fuel on a GA plane is usually due to poor flight/fuel planning or not readjusting fuel burn calculations for headwinds, routing, etc.

If you think of the 3 major fuel accidents of airliners (Avianca, Air Canda and Air Transat), and recognize that those happened in professional, multi pilot flight decks on advanced airliners, then it shouldn't be so difficult to see that this can happen in a singe private pilot flight deck of an non-advanced 30+ year old GA airplane.

[atcman23]

Fuel gauges for small aircraft only have one regulation: they must read Empty when the tanks are indeed empty.  There is no regulation about the accuracy of the gauge or that when the gauge reads full the tanks must be full.

[jonnevin]

precisely the reason that relying on them for fuel management has led to more than one crash

[mkop]

Millions of people drive cars and use their fuel gauge to decide whether to pull over now or to wait another 50 miles before getting gas. Why can't fuel gauges in small airplanes be just as reliable?

[Dave_B]

Millions of people drive cars and use their fuel gauge to decide whether to pull over now or to wait another 50 miles before getting gas. Why can't fuel gauges in small airplanes be just as reliable?

The shape of the tank and the variation in attitudes of the aircraft make it challenging. The implications of improving that technology are that many pilots will rely on them for decisions about refueling stops, in-flight flight planning, etc. Every pilot (or almost every pilot )knows that reliance on the guage alone is not smart,  and no company is going to come out with "A MORE RELIABLE FUEL GAUGE!" because the very first idiot that goes down because of reliance on the gauge will have the company in court. From a business standpioint it is probably best to leave that alone.