March 1, 201412 yr Today, halfway my flight, I noticed that the fuel consumption from both tanks was out of balance. The left tank had about 2/3 of fuel in the tank, while the right one was almost full. I have been looking all aorund the cockpit for a crossfeed for the fueltanks, but I couldnt find anything. Is there a crossfeed somewhere around, or is there some other way of dealing with this? Cheers! Maarten
March 1, 201412 yr Look up. It's above the windscreen. Depending on the settings of the two fuel knobs, you can feed from one or both tanks. Edit: from my notes: With one fuel selector on a tank, the other on All, more fuel will be used from the selected tank. Hook Larry Hookins Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
March 1, 201412 yr Author That's what I thought and I've been trying different settings, see what would happen, but since the fuel switches dont say from which tank a setting feeds, I couldnt figure out how to do that. Which setting is for both tanks and which for left or right? But if it has to use the fuel to even out both tanks, isnt that going very slowly? The flight where this happened was a short flight, less then 40 mins, and in such short flights I'm not used to pay very much attention to fuel levels, since you dont even see a difference between the start and the end of a flight. So I didnt see that the difference in the tanks what this extreme, untill I was past halfway the flight and therefor there was very little time left to let the engines empty a tank for 1/3rd. Shouldnt there also be some option that lets fuel from one tank into the other, to level them out in a matter of minutes? Cheers! Maarten
March 1, 201412 yr But the fuel switches do say it: Front engine receives fuel from left tank or both. Rear engine receives fuel from right tank or both. More fuel than needed is pumped to the engines and the unused fuel is collected in the tank corresponding to the engine. So if the front engine receives fuel from both tanks, part of the fuel from the right tank is transfered to the left tank.
March 2, 201412 yr Author Mine sais: 'T.O. and LDG left/right' and 'Level Fly Only'. It doesn't mention 'both'. And the 'T.O. and LDG left/right' aren't connected to any word indicating what it points at and since the 'Level Fly Only' doesn't point to a tank, it doesn't seem logical the text on the 'left/right' setting does. I thought the 'left/right' pointed to the systems, as front is left and rear is right on the panel. And since the text is clear the settings may not be used in on another part of the flight than indicated, it prevented me to use T.O and LDG in level flight and vise versa. So, the 'T.O and LDG' are the left and right tank and the 'Level Flight Only' are both. That indeed clears things up a whole lot. Thanks guys. Cheers! Maarten
March 3, 201412 yr Sorry, I did not remember it correctly and I just looked it up: Any engine can only take fuel from the tank of one wing (actually interconnected tanks, but they can be seen as one bigger tank). Green (T.O. and LDG) takes only from the usual tank, yellow (Level Fly Only) only from the other. The corrected version of my statement above would be: So if the front engine receives fuel from both tanks the right tank, part of the fuel from the right tank is transfered to the left tank.
March 31, 201412 yr Author I noticed that I have different fuel levels quite often, lately, while I never had this before and than we're talking about 1/4th tank difference, even. I tried different settings with the selectors, but not one makes the difference in level change, not even after 45minutes of flying. With the left tank being lower on fuel than the right tank, I tried both selectors to the left, as well as both selectors to the right, but nothing evens out the difference. Is this a bug, or am I still doing something wrong? Cheers! Maarten
Create an account or sign in to comment