LSA rental has inoperable fuel gauge. How to deal with school to fix it?

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Sling 2 Pilot
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Joined: Wed Jan 17, 2018 4:53 pm

Re: LSA rental has inoperable fuel gauge. How to deal with school to fix it?

Post by Sling 2 Pilot »

kaputt16 wrote:One of the schools I rent from in my local area has a bunch of LSAs for rent. One of their aircraft is a tailwheel that I liked to rent fairly often because it’s used far less than their other aircraft and I have a pretty good amount of tailwheel time.

However, the fuel gauge has stopped working in the aircraft. It’s a digital gauge on a G3X. The entire time you fly the aircraft and no matter what fuel level is in the tanks, it reads 10 gallons on each side. I have heard from a CFI at the school that if you fly long enough the gauges will jump from 10 straight to 3 gallons a side, but I don’t believe anyone has actually tried to prove if that final 3 gallon reading is accurate or not. The issue has been written up as a squawk on the aircraft a few times and I’ve heard unofficially from some instructors at the school that the management thinks it’s an issue with the sensors, but they don’t want to fix it because it would be highly labor intensive (possibly taking the wings off, but the CFIs weren’t sure).

I’m not comfortable flying the plane because the squawks haven’t been addressed and they also haven’t even gone through the trouble of providing a fuel dipstick. I also read the following article on AOPA (https://pilot-protection-services.aopa. ... -attention) and I thinks it’s possible they are actually in violation of the regs.

My conversations with CFIs at the school have made it seem like the ownership has expressed little interest in actually fixing the issue. The advice has apparently been just fill it up to near full and you’ll be good. To me that’s not good enough. An operating fuel gauge is crucial to know if your fuel burn is actually accurate or if you happen to have a leak develop some where in the system. Just because you take off with visually full tanks does not mean you’ll be fine.

I’ve been renting from this school for almost 2 years now and have over 100 hours in their aircraft, so hopefully I have some credibility with them. My question is, what is the best way to address this with the school? I don’t want to come across as threatening them, but I want to address that I think having a faulty fuel gauge in aircraft available for rent is a serious problem and that I think it should be fixed.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
So, have they fixed it yet?
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