Originally Posted by arthur106

1.) On my second day of real flying after completing the checkout flights, I had a partial engine failure. I told a customer to transition from an ascent into a decent. The customer got a little too excited and we ended up pulling ~0 G's for about a second--no more. The engine sputtered out almost completely and for a second or two things got pretty quiet. The power slowly came back and the engine was vibrating quite a bit. It didn't come back completely, we were only able to maintain 1950-2000 rpm in level flight. I did all my checks (carb heat, primer, ignition, etc.) and couldn't find the cause. We turning back towards the airport and I discovered that leaning the mixture resulted in immediate rpm increase. It was odd, as I've never had such a sensitive mixture control nob. Pulling it out just a hair resulted in a ~200 rpm increase and pulling it a hair further killed the engine. We were able to make it back to the field without incident. After landing and shutting down the engine, we did a runup and achieved 2200 static rpm ("normal" for this plane). The "boss" (will go unnamed) supposedly looked at it and said there's nothing wrong with it. I didn't make a fuss of this, as I'm really no expert, but as a mechanical engineer something about this doesn't sound "fine".

2.) As soon as I arrived, management changed the way planes were assigned. Rather than a pilot "owning" a plane for a day, we rotated planes. You'd be lucky to fly the same one twice in one day. This brought up the concern of keeping track of fuel. Before, ground crews would fill it to tabs, the pilot would (should) verify this, and then they can keep track of air time and have a pretty good idea of how much fuel is left. With the new system, we were expected to trust ground personnel to keep track of fuel. There were two main points brought up about this. 1.) You're blindly trusting the ground personnel actually filled up the tanks and that the pilot(s) before you verified this. It's not unimaginable for this to go wrong. 2.) You're also counting on ground personnel to keep track of air time properly. In my short time there, they already screwed this up once. They told me there wasn't enough fuel left for a 23 minute flight when I still had ~20 gallons.