[Paul Sharp]

Noticed a couple of queries on the first page of this thread asking about my model (sorry, but didn't see them earlier). I have a 1967 Turbo B model.

It has separate tanks, separate fillers, separate caps, and fuel selector positions for main, aux, cross-feed, and off.

Here's a little more thinking. I checked my BEW yesterday (hadn't looked at it in a while), and it's 1377. So if I put full fuel in (128 gals. = 768)), I have a usable weight of 609 bls. left. That means I can take 3.48 FAA (175 lbs. each) passengers, but in reality I always get the weight of the people involved and go by that. If there is baggage then there's more to figure and deal with.

I usually leave my main tanks full and the aux. at 7 lbs. each. That's 624 lbs. of fuel and means I have a remaining useful load of 753 lbs. - which is four FAA passengers and 50+ lbs. of luggage. So I seldom even worry about the weight but just keep the heaviest up front during loading (empty CG is always nearer the reat than front on mine). If I know I'll start approaching the limits then I start planning on how to deal with it. Once we had 5 people in the plane, but 2 were well under the FAA's 175 lbs., and there was very little luggage for the 2.5 hr. trip. So I didn't even have to leave fuel out from the previous trip.

I definitely agree that you need to be sure to know the weights involved, and any time there is a question you have to get out the scale and figure things out, being careful to track the loading for CG too.

I like the 7 lbs. in each aux. even if I need to reduce what's in the mains because if you throttle back you can easily get 1/2 hr. of flying from them and if you really got stupid you know you can switch to the aux. tanks and start looking for a landing place pronto. If you don't have anything in the aux. tanks and got stupid you may not realize it until an engine stops and then you're out of options.