fuel calculations aren't this hard.

[Undertoad]

How many minutes is 5000 feet if you know what you're doing? The glider pilots can stay up all day...

Hey! Don't they put gas guages on those things? I mean, wouldn't he have noticed the needle starting to point down to that dread "E" and maybe put in a call to the nearest county airport? If there WAS no gas guage, I'd think he would do like I used to do when I had an old beater car with a broken gas guage. "Let's see, I just put in 10 gallons of gas. This old clunker gets 15mpg, so I'm set for 150 miles". I'd then make a note of the odometer reading, add 150 to that, and tape the mileage estimate to my dash, after subtracting 5 miles for good luck. When I hit 145 miles, I knew it was time to start looking for a Conoco sign.

And yeah, while he wasn't in a glider, he must have still had a certain amount of momentum going for him, and its my understanding that when you land, you put the plane into a brief stall, anyhow, so he must have had a couple of miles to pick out his landing spot. "Highway? Ummm, maybe not. Wouldn't want to land on a little old lady out for a Sunday drive. Dirt road? Perfect! Less chance of an encounter with an automobile and less chance of damaging the plane. I'll take it!"

But what do I know? I'm just a dumb cowgirl.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Hey! Don't they put gas guages on those things?

Yes, but they're fairly unreliable. They also don't work if you don't look at them. Also, having fuel in one tank doesn't help if you're only feeding from the empty one.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

How many minutes is 5000 feet if you know what you're doing? The glider pilots can stay up all day...

A 152 has something like a 6:1 glide ratio, so at 5,000 this guy had maybe a four to five mile radius to work from (depending on terrain elevation; altitudes are measured in feet above sea level) . Working against that is how much time/altitude he lost to bargaining, denial and other stages of grief before trimming for best glide speed (full nose up trim, in a 152) and picking a good spot to aim for.