At 01:21 PM 1/20/99 -0500, David Abrams wrote: >FWIW - Most of the light planes of the day had a big tank of fuel under the >panel and between the pilots legs.
>Also on my 415-C the master shuts off the big wire from the hat shelf to the >front. There is no electricity under the panel with the master off - but I >do not think it will make a lot of difference when the engine gets pushed >into the header tank in a crash. It might. If something is pulled apart and fuel is leaking all over, even a spark from shutting the master switch OFF can cause the thing to go up. I am sure that fuel leaking outside from wing tanks is much less likely to be ignited in this manner than fuel inside the cabin. I'm not trying to paint the Ercoupe as some sort of firetrap. I'm sure that records will show it to be reasonably safe. But someone asked me why I wasn't happy with the fuel system. Part of the reason I'm thinking about fires these days is that a local pilot (Vern Dallman, if anyone here knew him) recently died as a result of a hard landing that resulted in a fire, in a homebuilt. It's making me look for ways to make this Mooney safer. Vern flew a lot of airshow routines around here, probably the most famous was his routine in a Lincoln Beechey type (Little Looper), which actually had a real rotary engine (like in WWI, not a Mazda). He even flew it at Oshkosh in '89. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Dold ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://home.pacbell.net/sdold/ Say NO to useless over-quoting ----------------------------------------------------------------
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