Flight schools and gas pumping

Ed Haywood said:
Today a young man asked me for help using the pump. Self serve stations can be a bit cantankerous, so I gladly obliged. I told him to get the hose and ladder in place while I grabbed the static grounding cable.

When I handed the ground cable to him, he said "what's this?"

I said "are you a licensed pilot?" He said he was, but he had never fueled a plane before. He is in a big part 141 program.

At first it threw me, but then I snapped out of it and gave him a quick explanation. I'm not certain I saw comprehension.

But holy cow, how is it possible to never be shown how to fuel a plane? Surely that is a cross country teaching point?
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Why would a student in a professional pilot program be trained to fuel? What’s next? Cleaning the windscreen and driving a tug?
 
It's easy to believe that a student pilot has never pumped their own fuel, for all the reasons others have mentioned. In addition, where is it on the ACS? It's not, and therefore it's likely not in most training syllabi and therefore unless a CFI specifically takes the time to train on it (which they should), it's perfectly believable that they've never done it.

And if you've never been shown, it certainly could seem daunting. I mean just look at the typical self-serve fuel pump - there are switches and buttons and knobs all over the place. It's nothing like the gas pump for your car which is about as simplified as you can get. Let alone the card interfaces are typically awful and you have the additional steps of grounding the plane and (usually) turning the pump on. And then retracting the hose and grounding wire, etc. Of course, none of it is hard but it definitely isn't intuitive when the simplicity of auto gas pumps is our experience.

Any time something like this comes up - "what do you mean you don't know how to do (insert seemingly simple task here)?" I am reminded of this story I've told here before about my daughter and soap:

It's like when my daughter was about 3, we were in a hotel. She uses the bathroom and comes out looking very troubled.

"What's wrong honey?"
"There's no soap!"
I go into the bathroom, sure enough there's the bar of soap I had unwrapped earlier, next to the sink.
"It's right there, silly"
"Where?"
"That bar of soap right there."
"Bar soap? I don't know how to use bar soap!"

Which seems really ridiculous and still makes us laugh, but I paused a moment before responding, and realized that, actually, she probably didn't know how. All of the soap at our house is in the pump containers. So she may never HAVE used bar soap, and I never thought of it to teach her. It wasn't on my "child training syllabus". It was then that I realized MOST things are taught, not intuitive or obvious, and to blame the teacher (i.e. me) for lack of knowledge, not the student.
 
Clip4 said:
Why would a student in a professional pilot program be trained to fuel? What’s next? Cleaning the windscreen and driving a tug?
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Why should he have to do stalls? The Airbus won't let you stall.
 
KE5BM said:
I was trying to remember how I learned to self-fuel a plane.
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My first flight school had a full-service FBO. All I knew was that you called and a fuel truck showed up.

After switching airports I got my first encounter with a self-serve pump. CFI taught me how to fuel up the plane. I then realized what that weird looking box was next to the fuel pumps in MS Flight Sim 2000 (credit card processing terminal).

RussR said:
I mean just look at the typical self-serve fuel pump - there are switches and buttons and knobs all over the place.
It's nothing like the gas pump for your car which is about as simplified as you can get.
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And even a car gas pump can be daunting if you've never had to operate one.
For the northeast crowd, we get to see that when a car with NJ plates pulls into a gas station in a neighboring state. Some drivers try to figure out the pumps with varying degrees of success, others just ask a nearby driver for help.
 
Clip4 said:
Why would a student in a professional pilot program be trained to fuel? What’s next? Cleaning the windscreen and driving a tug?
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Why, color me shocked, your highness.

ETA:
You do realize I was being sarcastic?
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Per ISO, sarcasm must be rendered in green.
 
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I never fueled a plane until I owned one.
 
AV8R_87 said:
And even a car gas pump can be daunting if you've never had to operate one.
For the northeast crowd, we get to see that when a car with NJ plates pulls into a gas station in a neighboring state. Some drivers try to figure out the pumps with varying degrees of success, others just ask a nearby driver for help.
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It’s a NJ conspiracy to keep their people from leaving the state.
 
RussR said:
It was then that I realized MOST things are taught, not intuitive or obvious, and to blame the teacher (i.e. me) for lack of knowledge, not the student.
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I had this thought recently as well. In my line of work, I see many people who have left home for the first time and land at a station like mine with no idea how to "adult." There are a great many things that I (want to) believe parents expect their kids just pick up on their own. But they get to me and I'm having to discuss things like...how to do laundry.

Now, the military by design is supposed to assume that the new recruit knows nothing about anything. As such, for my DOD/DOW partners they typically spend their first months of service in a barracks environment closely monitored by senior enlisted. However, in my component the new recruits are often sent out to a detached unit with no such support. I mean, I have 18 year olds showing up who I have to help find a place to live and a means of transportation on day one.

But then again, there's the other extreme. I once had a new recruit show up in a limousine that his mother had paid for...because the young lad did not notify us of his travel plans so we had nobody at the airport to pick him up. It was a 2-hour drive from the Norfolk airport to my unit.
 
cowman said:
Most students are probably doing wet rentals and in something like a typical 172 they probably wouldn't need to refuel elsewhere even for their required cross country flights if they left with full tanks.

Ideally a good CFI would show their student how to do it at some point but it's not on the ACS and things like that can easily slip through the cracks.
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^^This. I got told in no uncertain terms not to fuel my school's plane at a foreign airport, or else it'd be out of my own pocket. Since I never flew more than ~100 miles away and I always departed with 4+ hrs of fuel, it was never really a thing.

I purchased my own plane shortly before my PPL check ride, and a ferry pilot delivered it shortly after I got my certificate. I used my favorite CFI for some transition training, and it was only during those flights that I got my first experience with self-serve fueling.

I've been flying for over 15 years now and still have some trepidation every time I approach a new fuel island, wondering what surprises this one will have in store for me.
 
I met some buddies at a local airport for lunch, maybe 3-4 years ago. We were hanging out, talking, on the ramp afterwards. All of us had driven in. We were near the
fuel pumps and another pilot had taxied over for fuel. About 5 minutes later he came over and asked if we knew how the pump worked. One of the guys said, “Well, there are 6 pilots here, ONE of us should be able to figure it out.” We were there a lot longer than we expected. The sign on the pump had all the instructions, like “…turn pump on….” But finding that switch was the real challenge.
 
Plano Pilot said:
The little country airport where I did most of my initial training, late 70's. and first job as a CFI, early 80's, just had a cigar box in a drawer where you left your check or cash. You did need to know where the switch was to turn on the pumps, next to the switch for the runway lights. It was that way into the 90's.
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I remember buying fuel on a flight between the lower 48 and Alaska with just a signature and a phone number. This was at a small airport in Canada about 5 years ago. About a month later I received a phone call asking for credit card information. It was definitely self-serve.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
I was the same pilot out of my pt61 program. Our flight school had pre filled plastic jerry cans of mogas for our LSAs, so I only ever filled it up at home base like that. Plenty of gas for a PPL xc requirement.

I didn't actually use the fuel pump anywhere else until I had my own airplane. And yeah, early on there were a few pumps where I found someone near by to help. If you're only accustomed to pumping gas from a modern auto gas pump, the procedure (and the sheer variety of different pumps out there) can be a little confusing.

Even now, 6 years and 850 hours later, I'll encounter a pump where it's not totally obvious what I need to do to get the gas flowing.

It is a skill I wish I was taught in training though, would have saved some early on embarrassment!
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Plastic fuel cans? Where do you attach the ground? Your going to die! Half the crowd on another aviation forum would get the vapors seeing that. :biggrin::biggrin: (see what I did there).
 
RussR said:
And if you've never been shown, it certainly could seem daunting. I mean just look at the typical self-serve fuel pump - there are switches and buttons and knobs all over the place.
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If the student finds switches and buttons and knobs all over the place to be daunting, maybe the cockpit isn't the right place for him/her.
 
GaryM said:
If the student finds switches and buttons and knobs all over the place to be daunting, maybe the cockpit isn't the right place for him/her.
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Perhaps I'm a bit more charitable, but without any training or exposure to either, both of them can seem daunting.

I think it's safe to say that your typical self serve fuel station that looks like this:

1785205923072.png

Is somewhat more daunting that your typical auto gas pump that looks like this:

1785206017164.png
 
dmspilot said:
Why should he have to do stalls? The Airbus won't let yo
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I used to pump my own fuel for the jump planes I flew. There was no grounding wire to be had. I never knew about grounding a plane until well after that.
That said, it was a podunk airport for sure.
 
Refueling the plane during my x-c’s was a required by my CFI.

-Skip
 
Bob Noel said:
"student" or "learner"?
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ca79c44733b772e82496aed9e769a072.jpg

(purple)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I always fueled the plane after every flight from lesson 1. I've only ever used full service when I'm parking somewhere for the night, like at KJKA. I honestly don't trust half the ramp kids to fuel my plane. They always get marks on the leading edge and never get the fuel where I want it.
At the flight school I'm an AP/IA at, our instructors don't fuel unless they have to, they have the students fuel. If there's a check ride that day or an early morning XC flight, I'll do it the night before, so they don't have to worry about it. Seen too many people that were completely clueless at airports and wanted to change that. Same with stated previously about not being a royal dbag on the ramp. Immediately move somewhere out of the way, don't blow your prop wash at people, if you blow out my hangar because you didn't push back far enough, the engine stops and you're sweeping it and cleaning up everything.
 
But yes, sometimes the fuel farms at an airport in the middle of BFE is weird and difficult to manage. Proper training on what to look for 100% helps that though. Just go snooping around until you figure it out. Maybe someone there knows its weird and comes to point it out and you get to see the cool planes stored there after. Helps the wife stretch her legs on the longer flights.
 
RussR said:
Perhaps I'm a bit more charitable, but without any training or exposure to either, both of them can seem daunting.

I think it's safe to say that your typical self serve fuel station that looks like this:

View attachment 153810

Is somewhat more daunting that your typical auto gas pump that looks like this:

View attachment 153811
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The other thing is those aviation self-serve setups aren't consistent. I've known how to operate them for a long time but even now sometimes I spend a minute trying to figure out the particular setup in front of me. There are a lot of oddball/cobbled together fuel setups out there. Some have everything tucked into a cabinet, others have it all in the open. Most have a separate pump switch you have to turn on, some don't. Some have the fuel nozzle in an older automotive style fuel pump, others have that firehose/reel thing. I've found one where the pump was outside and you had to walk into what looked like one of those prefab garden sheds to swipe your card and there was an ancient 80's style dot matrix printer apparently being used to make all the records. Some trickle fuel out, some blast it like a fire hose. Some nozzles don't stop for a few seconds after you let off the trigger. Or one of my favorites you have one payment kiosk and two pumps- one for 100LL and one for JET-A.... kiosk asks if you want pump 1 or 2 but there's no label indicating which one is 1 and which one is 2 and it doesn't say which is which on the screen either.

Although I'd say when I have difficulties 9/10 times it's because I can't figure out where the pump switch is hidden.
 
Crank out the pilots, just enough to pass the checkride.

Let them figure out the rest later.
 
Ed Haywood said:
When I handed the ground cable to him
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The number of times the ground cable has been a mess of spaghetti wrapped around the spool is to damn high.

Also 'fuel farm' can mean many, many different things. I've written my name and phone number in a book at the 'fbo' (aka shack next to the fuel farm) and got a phone call a few days later asking for CC numbers.

My first lesson at refueling was in West Germany and it started with 'don't use the red gas, only the blue'.
 
There are a lot of airports that don't have self-serve fuel. My old home base of Culpeper was one of these. You had to call for the fuel truck. Generally, when I'm at an airport without self-serve, I offer to fill the tanks myself (at Culpeper, I don't worry as there are enough Navions there that they know how to do it). Don't get me started on the unsafe idiots at Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge that put 40 gallons in my aux tanks rather than the main (this is VERY VERY bad) and acted like a bunch of dumbots when I pointed out that this could damage the plane or kill me.

Still a pilot should know how to fuel an airport because many airports may only have self serve pumps. Even back in the early 80s when I learned to fly there were some places I had to pump my own.

Of course, the amusing thing is watching a guy who has never serviced a Navion. 9 times out of 10, he'll put the ground clip on the nose gear centering tab. This is a piece of plastic and not electrically connected ot anything.
 
Initial Fix said:
It’s not just “big 141” schools. I didn’t learn to use a self pump until well after my private. I don’t remember how many self pumps were around in the 80’s either so it wasn’t something o got to do.
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until the automated ATM style credit card readers, pumps might be "self serve" capable, but there was always an attendant handy to run your card through the imprinting machine. They normally pumped the gas... How do I know? That was my summer job in college!!
 
This is definitely one of the biggest things that people should learn that isn't on the PTS/ACS. But, because it's not on the checkride, there's no requirement to teach it, so most schools don't unless their planes are fueled at the self serve pump.

DJTorrente said:
Per ISO, sarcasm must be rendered in green.
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What is this, WordPerfect for DOS?
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Also would be good for places to teach gas pumping and ramp etiquette. Seen a number of people probably unintentionally be pretty inconsiderate, pumping the gas then walking away and disappearing into the FBO for a half hour. Or pumping gas and then doing a 10 minute ground inspection/sumping while someone else is waiting. Inconsiderate IMHO.
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100%. Ive seen students and CFIs alike do run up at the hold short line... all while theres a line to depart behind them
 
Slight tangent, but
That student's CFI probably doesn't know how to pump gas as well.

There are probably other things that are being missed in teaching. If a student changes CFI's (because they leave when they get to 1500), between what the first CFI missed teaching and the second CFI misses, the student has a few holes in what they should know. The student doesn't know what they don't know.

It can get more serious. I had one CFII who skipped VOR's, the next one did it wrong, the third one did VOR arc turning but skipped the basics of how to use the CDI, probably assuming the first two covered that. It was a mess.

So the Sport Pilot who didn't know how to pump gas at a self serve also landed the wrong direction? Yeah, I can see how that happened.
 
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