In the wake of a Utah aircraft accident caused by fuel exhaustion, figures from the NTSB have emerged showing that 245 aviation accidents have occurred in the past five years due to pilots running out of fuel. In the Utah crash, the 52-year-old pilot was critically injured, and the NTSB reports that 32 people were killed between 2004 and 2008 as a result of such accidents.

What happened in the Utah crash won’t be out for at least several weeks, as the NTSB continues its investigation.  But, the issue of improper fuel management for pilots is a huge one: More than 80 percent of all crashes are due to pilot error, and weather and fuel mismanagement are among the leading causes, according to various reports.

This goes to the heart of something known in the aviation community as Aeronautical Decision Making, or ADM. Are pilots systematically assessing the risks associated with fuel management?

Here are some real-life situations where that systematic risk-assessment could be taking place:

• Is the pilot-in-command verifying what the line guy put into the fuel tanks? Is the pilot actually looking in the tanks after the line guy is finished fueling the plane?
• Are pilots using fuel-quantity measuring devices to “dip the fuel” in the tanks to compare against the actual gauges in the cockpit? Or, are they just eyeballing it?  (One pilot wrote in a private online discussion thread that his Cessna 182′s fuel quantity can vary as much as 16 gallons from one “top off” to the next. It just depends on what “top it off” means to the line guy fueling the plane, and how good the eyeballing method is. In a C-182, 16 gallons is more than 1 hours’ worth of cruising time, or enough to run out fuel more than 120 miles from your destination!)
• Are pilots monitoring their fuel consumption during the enroute phase of flight? And, are they adjusting for it?
• Most important, are pilots checking their attitude to ensure they aren’t suffering from the five hazardous attitudes that safety experts have identified with pilot error? Among those attitudes is the sense of invulnerability.

Some studies suggest that, of all the fuel-related crashes, a majority of them occurred in the near vicinity of their final destination.

Proper preflight planning and the pilot’s attitude before and during flight are two of the most significant factors in these situations.

Finally, don’t let the high cost of aviation fuel get in the way of making a safe decision: What’s more costly — a life or a few extra dollars out of your pocketbook?

Here’s a roundup of information on the Utah crash, other crashes involving low fuel, as well as links regarding pilot error and fuel:

• Here is KSL-TV reports on the problem
• Full gas tanks could stop many plane crashes
• Plane had only half gallon of fuel
• Nall Report: Fuel mismanagement second-largest hazard facing pilots; number of fuel-related crashes declined significantly, though