If you were going to steal fuel, wouldn’t it be from the drains?
My first thought as well. Why bother pumping up, when you can drain down?
There is also vandalism (sabotage). Few if any cases in Europe but certainly happens when parked in some places further away, and people are nervous about that. Airfield politics gets quite bad in some places, too.
Also it is quick and easy to siphon fuel out via the filler cap hole than try to drain it via the drain which, on many planes, comes out quite slowly. On the TB it comes out fairly fast but due to the design of the drain device you have to jam a specially made “thing” in there to keep it coming out and not get a load of fuel on the ground. Been there and done it, when trying to dump some 20+ USG of suspect contaminated fuel a few years ago.
The classic way to steal fuel is to park your low wing plane’s wing under a high wing plane’s wing, and the siphon method runs really fast. But even out of a TB20 you could siphon fuel quite nicely into jerrycans, with no special devices needed.
Colin wrote:
We have had several fuel thefts from aircraft at my home base.
Sad to hear
Timothy wrote:
If you were going to steal fuel, wouldn’t it be from the drains?
Better you could try mixing some Ethylenediamine (EDA) and watch a fall from the sky?
Worst case scenario they can still run with it on two stroke motorbike engines…
