Self-service avgas at my home airport is now $5.65 a gallon. And it promises to go higher with the next delivery from the fuel supplier. Suddenly, the cost of fuel is a much larger portion of my operating costs. I’ve been running lean of peak so the Lycoming IO-360 in my Cessna Cardinal runs at something under 10 gallons per hour. Doing the math at 10 gallons per hour is simple. It’s costing me slightly more than $56 per hour just for fuel. In mid-August, AirNav’s Fuel Price Report found that of the 3,530 FBOs it surveyed, the average price was $5.60 (the low price was $3.75 and the high price was $8.70).
One of the indisputable rules of aerodynamics is that things get quiet when fuel no longer reaches the engine, whether from mismanagement of the fuel system or fuel exhaustion. Nevertheless, the accident history is rife with accounts of pilots who crashed or made emergency landings when their engines were starved for fuel. They either didn’t know how to manage the fuel system or they were overly optimistic about how long their engines would run with the fuel they had on board.
