#189 Know How Much Fuel You Need or “May” Need!

Know how much fuel you need or may need direct to from the helicopter safety team. I'm Kenny Keller, creator helicopter line ground school. Welcome to Day 189 Coffee with Kenny. And I want to hit the first one of the seven. And, you know, we would think that running out of fuel would be something that wouldn't happen very often, but it does seem to happen, happen an awful lot. Always carry enough fuel for unexpected situations. Ignoring minimum fuel reserve requirements is generally the result of overconfidence, which we know is a problem. Lack of planning, which is another problem, or deliberately ignoring regulations. You know, the one thing I want to say about the whole fuel thing is something that I've witnessed over the years, and I'm really surprised at this. How many people don't time their fuel. Okay, we know this is a big subject and there's a lot to fueling, and I'm going to keep it as simple as. The one thing that I see people do commonly is just, oh, hey, I'm gonna throw on 20 gallons. And they fire up. Never start a timer. Many aircraft have a timer either on the instrument panel. Some have them on the radio equipment. Some people wear a watch. I used the cheap old kitchen timer. This is what I like to use. I use this religiously. I never fly without it, and I never take a flight without starting the timer. I mean, I start it every single flight. And I guess I was lucky that I had some good people that trained me early on. I'll give you an example. Chris Hauser, that you've seen in our videos, did his private commercial and CFI with me, and now he's out in the helicopter world. And we had him, you know, for a weekend of interviews recently when Chris was training originally somewhere probably in there, I think in the private area. Chris had never worn a watch in his life. And I was harping on the whole fuel and timing the fuel and either wear a watch or use the timer. Chris went out and got a watch, started wearing a watch, and wears one to this day, seven or eight years later. And that all developed. That all started when we were flying together. And I was always harping on fuel. Again, I just want to say I'm amazed at how many people just completely rely on the fuel gauge. We look at the fuel gauge, we use the fuel gauge, but you're still number one thing you should be doing is timing your fuel. You'll know your fuel burn per hour, and unless the aircraft starts leaking fuel, if you know the fuel burn and you know how many gallons you got in it you can always be verifying what's in the tank with what you put or with the fuel, amount of fuel that you put on board. And this is something again I just, you know, a lot of people overlook and a lot of people do it and that's great. But so many people I've run into, even the recent past, it seems like they just jump in and go and they just always, oh, egg. Yeah. Fuel gauge says half or fuel gauge says whatever. You use the fuel gauge but you can't trust it. Luckily in the instrument we got this beautiful stick. And I talk about it all the time, factory stick, bam. You dip the tank, you check it. I do that before every flight and I do it after every flight. And I do it religiously. I use the stick every single time, I use the timer every single time. And for those of you that are good job, if you have gotten laxed, maybe you better up your game on the checking the fuel and timing your fuel. It is all simple math. And when you're out flying, you should have it broken down to the aircraft you fly. And in your mind you should know what it burns every 15 minutes. Because once you get kind of good at this and you practice a little bit, you will get really good at knowing. You know, okay, I'm 15 minutes into my flight, I've burned about this many gallons. And you can always be using or checking the fuel gauge to help you verify what you know is in there and what you know you're burning. And then example, if you maybe got a fuel leak, link leak, a fuel leak during your flight, you're going to notice it and you're going to notice that maybe the fuel gauge is going down faster than normal. Just, just an example, I want to leave you with that thought today. You know, this upswing of helicopter accidents, that's what we're talking about right now, we're going to talk about in the next few days. This came out from the US helicopter safety team because the first half of 2019 is very deadly. And of the seven things they talk about, that's the very first one that they list is fuel. Knowing what you have, knowing what you need, and knowing what you may need. One thing that I think people run into, and I know I've run into it, when you're doing a cross country, you can do the proper planning, but then you go land at an airport, oh, the fuel truck's down or their pump won't operate. So when you're doing these cross countries, you got to think about ahead of time. Like it's a good idea to call where you're actually going to be stopping and say, hey, I'm going to be coming through today at such and such time. Just want to make sure your pumps are up today and make sure that there's going to be somebody there. Always calling to verify because you know I've been stuck and it happens to you, right? So I always try to plan the cross country out so that my first fuel stop, there's more than just reserve. There's enough fuel to get to another small airport prior to burning down to my fuel reserve. Just a good basic planning thing that works. And then, you know, when I go around the pattern when I'm just flying, I that's why I like keeping it an hour. Not only is that the best for a student, but that way each time I have a system, we don't go full of fuel around the pattern. It just doesn't make sense. I know every time I'm running the same amount of fuel and I know that if I'm on the dolly about 5, 0 minutes, 5, 5 minutes, I know that I'm going to have my 20 minute reserve in the tank. And that's pretty much how I do it for the going around the pattern. And you can basically do the same thing as well. It is a Saturday. It's my favorite day of the week. I know what I want to say. It's up to us. It's up to us to turn the scales on this rise in helicopter accidents. You know, always think, well, what's the FAA going to do about this? Or what's the NTSB going to do about this? It boils down to us, us, the, the pilots. It's up to us to train, retrain, refresh our knowledge, stick with the good basics that we learned from day one as pilots. It's us. We are the ones that will change the safety record. Let's get that thing going back down for the second half of 2019. All right, I'm going to wrap it up. I am Kenny Keller, creator, Helicopter Land Ground school. We got four courses, private commercial CFI. An instrument. The link down below for helicopterground.com will give you access to all of those along with our two Amazon number one best selling books that I've been talking about almost every day. That's because we're proud of them and we ship them to you for just shipping and handling. So do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. When you do, click that little bell that will notify you of the daily video. Below the videos, there's the thumbs up icon. Click that dude. And if you're one of those who want to click the dislike, just make sure you click the dislike. Quite, quite. Jesus, I swear I'm just drinking coffee today. Click the dislike twice if you don't like the video. Awesome. Put your comments down below and we will see you in day 190. Peace out.