Fuel Sensor Accuracy
The following quoted from reference 2.
This FAR Part 91.205 fuel-gauge requirement can be seen as a corollary of a more general and more fundamental point, namely the importance of taking a layered approach to safety.
For any important task, you want to have multiple independent ways of dealing with the task, so that each way can serve as a cross-check and a backup for the other(s).
For example, the right magneto is a backup for the left magneto. Similarly, pilots are trained to never overemphasize or underemphasize any particular instrument, but rather to scan all the instruments, cross-check them, and use all available information to build an understanding of the overall situation.
When we apply this idea to fuel, it means you should have multiple independent sources of information about the fuel quantity.
Good sources include:
- The preflight measurement in combination with an estimate of the fuel-burn rate and the elapsed time.
- The fuel level gauges and by corollary the fuel level sensors
No one source should be overemphasized at the expense of the others.
Remember that having two magnetos doesn’t just make the engine twice as reliable; it makes it thousands of times more reliable.
Using gauges as a backup to a visual preflight, flight planning and totalizer makes fuel exhaustion vastly more unlikely.
CiES Inc builds accurate and reliable fuel level sensors -
- “Pilot-In-Command Decisionmaking” (Chapter 21 of See How It Flies) http://www.av8n.com/how/htm/decision.html
- "Aircraft Fuel Gauge Accuracy" http://www.av8n.com/fly/fuel-gauges.htm