fuel use

If you go to the fuel menu it should show what you have left as a percentage, that should give a fairly good idea of how much you have used.

o, then how do you convert that to pounds

I don't fly jets. Does their fuel load show in pounds rather than gallons? If it shows in pounds it would be simple, if it's in gallons you would have to know how much a gallon of jet fuel weighs and that I can't tell you, but I'm sure that information is available.

o, i was wonder cuz you upsva, when you fill out a pirep you have to tell them how much fuel you used in pounds

I know that's the way airlines figure their fuel use. I am guessing but I think that is because when they take on fuel they have to know what the weight is to make sure the load doesn't exceed the maximum weight for the aircraft. Fuel would be a big part of that load.

If you find out how much jet fuel weighs then calculating the pounds shouldn't be that hard. Just multiply the gallons times the weight of a gallon of fuel.

Hit "Shift+Z" two or three times and the two red lines of information will show you what's left.

Twice will do it.🙂 Duh! Why didn't I think of that, I keep that up on the screen to monitor my frame rates. The only thing you need to know other than that is how much fuel you started with in gallons or pounds. If I recall jets don't always start with a full load of fuel so you would have to calculate fuel use based on what your starting load was.

Here is an online converter:

http://www.digitaldutch.com/unitconverter/

If you feed an internet search engine you can find more... 😉

I don't think that one will be able to tell him how much fuel he used. 😳

What you need to do for next time, as it's too complicated this time, is plan out the amount of fuel you want to use, don't just head off into the blue with full tanks unless the flight calls for it. It's easier on takeoff and landing if you don't have extra bulk on the plane anyway.

Here's something to do-

After you plan your flight, go to the NAVLOG page

it'll show some numbers, and names
Look at Estimated Fuel Burn: Let's say it says 33,485. This is a crappy estimate by FS, it doesn't take into accound the ungodly amount of fuel needed to get into the air anyway, so we're gonna use it as a "Base amout."

What we need to do is look at a few things and have ourself and edumacated guess. Let's say the flight is 2:45. This is ESTIMATED again, and it's Time Onroute, not time from "hey let's go" to "Hey we're here"

Assuming it's really gonna take us 3 hours to get there, if not more, and it expects a fuel burn of less than 33,500lbs, we need to bring this far up.

A safe guess would be around the 70-100,000lbs mark. We need a margin, we don't want a boat 😉

This is how we do it in the real world, with C-130's. Our regs state that we have to plan to have 7000 lbs when we land at our destination. This is of course without us needing to file and alternate due to weather or other things. Our fuel burn can be anywhere from 4k to 6k an hour, depending if we are doing high level or low level work.

If we are going to be flying for 5 hours, high level, we can expect to burn approx 25 + the 7k reserve. We would load the plane with 36k to fudge the added weight and if it's hot outside, etc.

Most aircraft/airlines will have a standard fuel load for the altitude, duration, and load.