Advice on how to keep tanks balanced with fuel jettison and engine failure

[VHOJT]

Hi all,

Bascially got myself in over my head trying to practise this - has anyone got some tips/advice?

 

[Captain Kevin]

I guess I'm not really too sure what problems you had, but QRH gives you the steps on what to do. You turn on the fuel pumps to all the tanks that have fuel (you didn't really specify how much you started out with, so I don't know which tanks had fuel or not). Once your stabilizer tank is out, if it had fuel in the first place, shut those pumps off. Once the center tanks are out, if it had fuel in the first place, shut those pumps off. In most cases, you're only dumping enough fuel to get to maximum landing weight, so I'm not sure you'd run into a situation where you'd have a fuel balance issue. If you really wanted to dump more, I'd say once you got tanks 2 and 3 close to tanks 1 and 4, I'd stop dumping fuel at that point.

[berts]

On 5/29/2018 at 4:18 AM, VHOJT said:

Hi all,

Bascially got myself in over my head trying to practise this - has anyone got some tips/advice?

 

In addition to what Kevin has said, one of the first things you should do is decide on how much fuel you want to remain and if you need to dump fuel at all, because it will take a long time to reduce the aircraft's weight from MTOW to MLW.  Depending on the type of emergency (e.g. Cargo fire) it may sometimes be safer to land overweight than risk a long delay by dumping fuel.  Don't dump fuel with the Flaps out, or in the Hold, or below 6,000ft and avoid areas of lightning.  Leave enough fuel so that you can land safely on the planned runway (ideally just below MLW, RWY length and A/C performance permitting). You cannot dump all of the fuel (3,100Kgs will remain as a minimum in each main tank), so you need not worry about leaving the Jettison Pumps on.  Just monitor the EICAS display. keep the Fuel Page visible on the Lower EICAS and switch the Jettison pumps off when the Fuel to Remain quantity flashes because the Jettison will have stopped automatically.

Bertie G