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Chapter-1 Getting Ready to Fly-V20_Sport Pilot Handbook 8/30/2021 5:42 PM Page 5

Chapter 1: Let’s Go Flying 1-5

Auxiliary fuel tanks on the wingtips can carry a lot of extra weight The horizontal stabilizer should be horizontal.
which makes it easier to bend a wing during a hard landing.

Elevator Horizontal stabilizer

Auxiliary tank
on each wing
Fig. 6

Instead of landing gear problems, it’s possible (albeit
quite rare) for one wing to be bent. Take for instance air-
planes that have auxiliary tip tanks (Figure 6). These tanks
can hold 10 to 15 extra gallons of fuel (think 60 to 75
pounds). That’s a lot of extra weight on a wingtip as an add-
on accessory item. During an extremely hard landing, that
extra weight could bend one of the airplane’s wings. This is
why an aeronautical engineering friend of mine always Stabilator
checks airplanes with wingtip tanks extra carefully. At least
that’s the tip on tip tanks that he offers.
Another thing best noticed from a distance is when a hor-
izontal stabilizer is bent at an angle (Figure 7). This is some-
thing that’s not right—or left. The part is called a horizontal
stabilizer for a very good reason—it’s supposed to be hori-
zontal. So how does it get bent? Well, it can be rough out
there on the ramp. In one case I’m familiar with, a fuel
Should be appx.
truck backed into the airplane, then drove off without re- the same height
porting the problem. Given the mass of a fuel truck, it’s not as other side of
the stabilizer
hard to see how it can make a mess of an airplane. Think
rhino vs. VW. And given the difference in size, the decibel
level to which the fuel boy has his iPod cranked up, and the
ambient noise at an airport, it’s certainly possible to have
hit some part of flying machine and not be aware of it. This
is especially true if the gas boy (the liquid petroleum alloca-
tion engineer, who can most definitely be a girl) doesn’t have
good hearing or is not good at interpreting sounds such as
thump and crunch. This is just one more reason why all gas
dispensing personnel should attend “thump and crunch”
sound identification class.
While your preflight actually begins when approaching
the airplane, it’s when you can actually sniff, look, poke and
feel the airplane that the finer details of the machine’s air-
worthiness (or lack of it) are revealed. Fig. 7