How do I calculate how much fuel I must fuel the aircraft to taxi to the head of the runway?
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short answer: you don’t.
If there would be a formula for this, it would have so many variables, that it would be easier to quickly refuel while holding short (something we don’t encourage, of course).
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I’d recommend putting an hours worth of more fuel in just in case.
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I am sure there is an equation, but with aircraft you don’t always have to be completely precise with the fuel you put into the aircraft. Always have some wiggle room, and taxi won’t take that much fuel.
In the real world, however, airlines will try to put close to the minimum amount of fuel needed into the aircraft for the flight😂
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Really! 🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂
@Wesley77X. MaxSez: The wise Pilot assesses announced Delays, Traffic flow and Distance from his Spot to the Threshold and add it into his reserve fuel requirement. The FAA sez:
VFR/IFR. Once you’ve gotten everything planned and it’s time to add on the required fuel reserve (which includes The Taxi requirement) the fuel load Is based on the airplane’s fuel burn rate from a regulatory standpoint.
For VFR If the airplane burns ten gallons per hour for example , you can easily calculate that you need an extra five gallons reserve which is 30 minutes of flight duration at ten gallons per hour, for day VFR, and you would need 7.5 for night VFR under FAA regulations, which is 45 minutes of duration, so you would just add those to the total that you calculated that you would need to get to your destination, and you have successfully planned your VFR reserve.
For IFR, you would have to select an alternate if the weather conditions or routing require one, plan your flight to your destination, then to the alternate, and then add on 45 minutes worth of fuel after reaching the alternate, which would be 7.5 gallons after reaching the alternate airport. (The plan would include sufficient. Fuel too reach the destination + the Alternate when a reserve is required)
Max Sends
(Food for thought: How much does a Gallon of AvGas or JP weight? in LBS?)
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The simple answer…take your average fuel burn per hour while taxiing, divide by 60 to get burn per minute. Plan an appropriate taxi out/in time. So if you burn 26lbs per minute on taxi and planned 20 minutes total for taxi out and taxi in, then you’ll want 520lbs. Doesn’t need to be a precise number unless you’re really keen on putting in the absolute bare minimum legal fuel in the plane.
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You don’t really need a lot of fuel for taxi. It mostly only takes up to 10 minutes with engines mostly idle. If you check this IF-Operations report, you will see that the plane uses nearly no fuel during taxi
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I like to single engine taxi to save fuel
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What tool is this? Where do I find?
It is called IF-Operations
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I have been delayed once in RL because taxiing was so long (bad weather announced and plenty of planes landing and taking off before the storm) that once we were first in line for takeoff, the captain had to back taxi the whole runway for more fuel… was funny! So take more than needrd for busy IF events!
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Well, usually the taxing fuel for large aircraft will be around few hundreds of kg, except sometimes you have a super long taxing route or a heavy traffic at the airport that you need to wait for a long time. It usually won’t affect the plane’s takeoff performance cause the changes are so small.
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