Originally Posted by
shdw
Did you declare? If not, did you at least use pan, pan, pan? If you don't know what that is/does/provides (anyone else reading this, not directed at ryan) you should research it!
Sounds like your thought process was:
oh ****...
no one will believe...
oh ****...
My only question is, why didn't you think of the sharks man!
Actually every center was a little out of range (on the longest leg over water - about 400nm) - A Jet Blue flight out of PR relayed my request to contact San Juan Center. After a few freq changes and finally being able to receive them (and visa versa)... I told them I had a fuel valve problem, only feeding one tank now - Turks are too far to turn back, there looked like a significant weather build-up over PR, so diverting to Punta Cana (my alternate) was really an easy decision...
I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and I'd been flying since about 2am that day (it was about 5pm then), but I thought about it some more... I was diverting from my eAPIS (so I asked him to inform US Customs - which never happened), the Atlantic is a big place... giving them my present lat/long and fuel left/persons on board/course would not be a bad idea if worse came to worse.
How accurate are the 172 fuel gauges?
The controller wished me luck, chatted a little bit, and then switched over to Punta Cana ...So I actually declared with them. That airport is pretty busy, when I passed over the coast my fuel gauge was sitting on about 1 gal - turned base for 9 and it started coughing, shut off on the apron.
Didn't speak much Spanish, so trying to get AVGAS was a bit of a challenge... finally did - had to go to the tower to file an official IFR paper flight plan (which was in Spanish
), because it was night time (night time in the Islands means IFR). The plane needed to be in PR that night, so I figured with one good tank the jump from shouldn't be too hard. In hind sight I should have probably waited until someone checked out the airplane, but that's the kind of decisions no sleep will get you...plus the logistics of getting an A&P at that airport, well I wasn't too sure about anyways. Of course they didn't have any low-enroute charts for Dom Rep... so I had to use a high-alt to mark my way points. It's only a little over an hour.... so no big deal. Landed at Aguadilla (Borinquen), US Customs AIAs surrounded my plane... told them about what happened, they were pretty cool about it all (after a brief search).
The A&P in PR said that the "ball" in the fuel valve disconnected and got stuch in the right tank, so only the left would feed.