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A slight detour south of London

My first IFR flight plan to cross the London TMA at FL90 was accepted, routing from EGBJ (Gloucester) to EBOS (Ostende).
The L9 airway makes this look very direct and straightforward all the way.

EGBJ N0144F090 MALBY L9 KONAN EBOS

Not unexpectedly, we started getting vectored by headings shortly after joining the airway but then ended up flying straight over Goodwood and into the Channel.
The controller was profusely apologetic, saying that both Heathrow and Gatwick were “fully stacked up” with airliners. He asked if that had implications for fuel reserves, and we replied that on this occasion it didn’t – a greater concern was being unnecessarily out of glide range.

Filed enroute time: 1:24
Actual enroute time: 1:44
Overhead 24%

ICAO doesn’t mandate planning extra fuel reserves for the en-route section of IFR flight, but most commercial operators and Autorouter add 5%

While I don’t expect to get the same direct routings of 100M or more that I’ve had in France, Belgium and Germany when transitting such a congested zone, I do wonder if this was an exception and whether we might expect better in future. It would make a bigger difference on a longer flight, such as nearer full range and/or with strong headwinds. I don’t think (but honestly don’t really know) if flying higher would make any difference – we don’t have oxygen and the relatively short hop wouldn’t justify the time and extra fuel required to climb further.

FlyerDavidUK, PPL & IR Instructor
EGBJ, United Kingdom

From the looks of the airspace, at 4000ft MSL you could have gone straight, OCAS obviously.

Huh? Going straight would have taken him through all kinds of controlled airspace, mostly class A.

David: yes, you should get O2 for these occasions. The flight wasn’t that short after all. FL150 would possibly have done the trick.

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

Pretty normal. Higher is better as you were right in the altitudes of the stacks for the major airports. This is busiest airspace in Europe. You just have to accept it or fly higher.

EGTK Oxford

ICAO doesn’t mandate planning extra fuel reserves for the en-route section of IFR flight, but most commercial operators and Autorouter add 5%

No, but EASA does. Unless you have statistical data to motivate a lower value, it should be 5%.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

NCC-Ops is not there yet so there is no EASA fuel carrying mandate for private operators today.

Also, most GA pilots don’t know their fuel status to anywhere near 5% accuracy.

I’d say the overall GA figure is nearer to +/- 20%. That is why we have so many fuel exhaustion accidents, and a big reason why so many people do only very short flights. Of the small % of people with totalisers, I know for a fact that many never use them (EASA-reg TB20s, with the totaliser in the wrong place and no legal way to fix it… ) but they will be OK.

Still, 5% is a very small margin, in the context.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Of the small % of people with totalisers, I know for a fact that many never use them

Interesting – I never knew it was this bad. I just assumed everyone with a reasonable capable IFR cruiser, and a 430 & upwards had a GPS linked totalizer (& obviously used it)…

Interesting – I never knew it was this bad. I just assumed everyone with a reasonable capable IFR cruiser, and a 430 & upwards had a GPS linked totalizer (& obviously used it)…

To be honest, in most cases it is not required. My aircraft has an endurance of 7 hours. I always fly with full tanks unless the airport has no fuel. I rarely ever fly longer than 4h. With this profile, I do not need a fuel totalizer, I don’t even need fuel gauges other than for cross checking that there is no fuel leak.

It’s true that most pilots of “advanced” IFR aircraft do only short trips, but it would be interesting to have a poll as to exactly why. And I bet you that if you interviewed the pilots personally you would find that many avoid long trips because they don’t have much confidence.

Confidence is in two parts: confidence in their ability, and confidence in their aircraft. The 1st you can’t do much about (the pilot has to sort it out themselves) but the 2nd can be driven by repeated systems failures / systems that are not properly understood. How many G1000 owners know anything beyond how to load a route? I know for a fact that a good % of G1000 renters (one SR22 I have in mind) don’t even know how to load a route (and they fly with a handheld GPS or an Ipad).

So I can’t see the point of having something useful in the aircraft and having it INOP (or not understood) long-term. It will be just another useless gadget, instead of being a gadget which tells you that you can fly for another 750nm, and you expect to be landing with 35.5 USG in the tanks. That is a huge confidence booster.

And, after all, it may have been say a €5k factory option.

Finally, anything connected to the fuel system has the potential for major trouble, so flying with an INOP totaliser (or one you don’t use – same thing) is wasting an opportunity for detecting some major issue.

Socata shafted EASA-reg TB owners with a crappy flow totaliser installation, 20-30% off, sold with a typical Gallic shrug attitude, and with the owner left to fiddle with the K-factor to fudge the error which itself has a 5-10 percentage point variation on it so even the fudge is useless for the job. There are probably other examples because it’s easy to do this mistake, and the installation docs for the transducers contain detailed instructions which suggest that a lot of people manage to do it wrongly.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
55 Posts
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