Frank is right — I’d trust my fuel gauges about as much as I’d trust a drunk Republican senator in a room full of pages. For fuel management, however, I have a couple of advantages over both of you:

Unlike Frank, I fly a single-engine plane with a fixed-pitch prop, and have a much smaller range of altitudes, so I don’t have as many variables to control: at any given power setting, my fuel flow is very predictable.

Unlike Blake, I’ve been flying the same plane for almost 8 years and 700 hours, so I know it pretty well. For the past few years, I’ve calculated my fuel burn after almost every flight (writing many of them in the journey log), and I can normally predict it to within 0.2 gal/hour now.

Still, I like to land with at least an hour’s reserve in the tanks even when I’m VFR. You have to be wrong only once …

Even with a calibrated dipstick, you’d only know with certainty the fuel amount at the start of the flight. If your fuel pressure / flow / level gauges are not precise & accurate to the same extent, concerns about fuel are quite rational.

My experience with fuel measurement has always been using a dip stick. “3/4 tanks” or “1/2 tanks” is usually the measurement. Not “21 gallons”. So how do you accurately determine how much fuel is in each tank?

Maybe this is a reason why my greatest fear with flying is fuel exhaustion. I haven’t had the luxury of using an accurate method of determining on board fuel quantity.

However, once in a long while, a larger load appears – whether an extra adult, or an unusual quantity of cargo. I have to remember to whip out the rusty W&B calculator from its dusty corner and check things. I may have forgotten once or twice.