One of the aircraft owners user groups postulated an interesting question. Does the density of airports affect the number of fuel starvation events?
Are you more likely to push the fuel envelope if you feel safer knowing there are many suitable
alternatives to land and refuel, and do pilots take advantage of those opportunities.
As always when it regards aircraft fuel, it is always an interesting question and not a lot of concrete information available. Most of what is written about aircraft fuel level is unfortunately anecdotal.
So armed with a fuel starvation/ exhaustion dataset gleaned from the ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) I set out to see what actually would shake out if we looked at number of airports per sq. mile and fuel related aircraft issues and put it on an overlay of the USA. Darker States are worse off than Lighter States.
Generally speaking - pilots seem to be more careful out West where airport density is lower.
I did evaluate the per state fuel starvation statistic by number of aircraft per state, but as aircraft quickly transition from one state to the next, I didn't believe it held much merit to display.
What does show up in many graphs of this type is that Wisconsin and EAA draws a number of pilots from around the USA and a fair percentage tend to inadvertently stay longer than planned.
Stealing an safety idea from the Cirrus Pilots Association
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