If You Trusted Your Aircraft Fuel Gauge?

How would you operate your aircraft

If you knew, at all times, how much fuel you had.

Hard to imagine, isn't it ?

Did you ever have that feeling that you might have put in the wrong fuel starting amount?

Did you really see fuel wash over the tabs?

Doubts about fuel level can creep into any flight.   

The statistics of fuel starvation, fuel exhaustion and fuel related loss of power events bear that out.  

But it is interesting to see that with a change in technology for fuel level reporting to Magneto Resistive Senders.

Some pilots are finding an opportunity to operate differently.

CirrusPilot

Commenter Dialogue:

I'm always surprised you do not fly your 22t topped off, were you taught to fly with minimum fuel? Maybe it's a West Coast thing, but my Cirrus SR22 is always sitting full and I fuel it every time it is at home.

Response:

Plane is hangared. Full tanks are heavier and the performance is affected. I carry 20g extra to a location like Vegas.

Oshkosh - EAA 2013

CiES Inc will be at OSHKOSH for the EAA AIRVENTURE  

We will be there...... but we will not be displaying our products at the show in a trade show booth.

We are demonstrating the system to several aviation OEM customers and potential customers.  If you are interested in the system and you are at OSHKOSH the early part of the AirVenture week - please reach out and contact us, we will be more than happy to demonstrate our system.

We continue to receive praise from our customers on the retrofit CiES Cirrus Fuel Level Kit

Noah Wood sent us this message yesterday

"Really happy with them. They are running really close to the totalizer. I posted a couple of shots on one of the COPA threads. I will post a couple of more on COPA after my next couple of flights.  I thought Clearstar Aviation in Addison did a good job on the installation.

I've noticed I actually prefer the digital display on the console to the tape on the MFD. Maybe it is force of habit. 

In my opinion, dollar for dollar, one of the best upgrades you can do to a Cirrus." 

Customer Responses to the Retrofit Cirrus Aircraft Kit

WHAT ARE THE CUSTOMERS  SAYING

David McGregor

Folks I just picked up the plane this evening from Advanced Aviation in Lancaster PA. Joel Glover and his team did an outstanding job installing the new CiES digital fuel sensors despite a steep learning curve on this first ever install. ... I had a chance to run the system through its paces on the short hop from KNLS to KMMU this evening.
I must say my first impression is WOW ! A huge improvement. I love having the fuel flow quantity on the MFD now, but the icing on the cake is the redundancy with the new digital fuel gauge that replaces the former analog version. Really cool looking, but more important is the functionality. I really like how you can flip between fuel quantity and the fuel burn graph, really helpful for fuel balance.
I would HIGHLY recommend this a must have upgrade to your Cirrus. Get in line now and place your orders.

Jeff Bessett

I just picked up MY aircraft, N874T SR20 - G3 Perspective with the new CiES fuel gauge STC - WOW. team at Advanced at Lancaster PA did the installation on my aircraft - and

Lancaster Avionics next door - did the avionics (Perspective) so it DOES show up on the Garmin Perspective system.

I only have 30 minutes flying with this, however, I believe this to be a game changer for anyone that has worried about the accuracy of the fuel gauges in their plane.

Tom Conroy

My partner, Gary Price and I just picked up our Cirrus from Leading Edge Aviation where they installed the new digital fuel gauges. I cannot tell you how nice it is to have a tool such as accurate fuel gauges. By using these gauges, we will be able to accurately assess whether there is a fuel leak in the system as well as accurately managing fuel supply. The gauges warn you ( by turning yellow) when there is a fuel imbalance in excess of that prescribed in the POH.

On the return trip, we wanted to see if we could land with equal fuel in each tank. About 20 minutes from our destination, we noticed a 6 to 7 gallon differential between tanks, so we switched tanks, and when we arrived at our hanger, there was less than a half

gallon differential. For some crazy reason, that made our evening...

Cirrus Aircraft Factory Fuel Level

We have been supplying Cirrus Aircraft fuel level senders for over a year.  There have been no issues or in-field replacements.  Now that the senders have proven themselves day in and day out and showing excellent reliability and repeatability.  We can now start to exploit the advantages accurate fuel level can provide.   

In the Cirrus Aircraft Facebook post yesterday - one of these new features came to light.  

Cirrus wrote the following:

Since spring of last year, our aircraft have come equipped with fuel level sensors that read accurately at all levels. In fact, they are so accurate that we were able to integrate a fuel imbalance message on the PFD in Generation 5 aircraft. The fuel level sensors in most of our competitors’ planes only read accurately when the fuel tank is empty or full. For more on the astonishing innovations that make Cirrus an industry leader: 
http://bit.ly/YZO6rT

Better information =  "informed"  decisions

As always when you forget,  a careful reminder will get things back to normal

Resistance is Futile

When you are talking about Fuel Level.  

When we designed our new digital fuel level sender we gave a lot  of thought on how to interface with older aircraft systems.

The question was:

Could we produce an resistance output to mimic an existing resistance fuel level reporting system.  

There would be a few clear benefits:

• We could interface with many more legacy aircraft 
• Incorporation of our system in aircraft already using resistance based sending would be easier.

However some of the issues of legacy aircraft were directly related to relaying resistance through the aircraft wiring as issues with resistance can provide false or error prone signals.   Resistance measurement on an aircraft was identified by us early on in the design process as not the most favorable method for accurate fuel measurement:

• Aircraft have long wiring runs
• There are multiple sensors and connections
• The connections needed to be ordered to produce a series for multiple sensors
• There were other connections in the aircraft - bad connections produced resistance 
• There were multitudes of different resistance values even for the same aircraft
• There were amplifiers in some aircraft to address the issues above
• The wire run was subject to aircraft vibration 
• The gauge quality and accuracy in legacy aircraft was - not ideal

The favorable aspect of resistive gauging was that it was easy for the average mechanic to diagnose.

• All they needed was an Ohmmeter.

• We had heard stories of Cessna 210 Centurion and Cessna Twin Aircraft with the dreaded Cessna breakout box to tune and diagnose the capacitive system.

So what we needed was a simple digital signal that could be read with the modern equivalent of a ohmmeter  - the Digital MultiMeter (DMM).  We can now get a digital frequency output of any connected sender.

We found that Digital Frequency gave us clarity for fuel level information over all the known wiring challenges - corroded contacts, poor splices and induced signals.  More importantly it gave us a good signal or nothing - induced errors did not conspire to give bad fuel level.

What seemed more natural is that the signal was similar to that used by the fuel flow transducer.  It seemed a natural  - and we could read the read and diagnose the signal on a DMM.

When we sat down after months of delivering a fuel level sending product that had zero issues and was easy to diagnose.  ---

We had come to  realized that we had found the best method for reporting fuel level on the aircraft and a communication standard for any application we applied our product to

Aerospace Logic - Cirrus Design Retrofit

In creating a new fuel level system for Cirrus Aircraft we kept in the back of our mind  the opportunity to provide this technology to legacy Cirrus Aircraft as well as other aviation applications.

Aerospace Logic was the obvious choice - 

We chose their 200 series unit over other 2 1/4 instruments as Aerospace Logic has created a quality and sunlight readable  display with a clear and concise level indication.

More importantly, Aerospace Logic like CIES saw accurate and reliable fuel level indication as a valuable instrument in the cockpit.  Aerospace Logic was hampered in achieving it's goals for fuel level indication by fuel level senders that were previously available to the aviation market.  CIES Level senders with our new and patented technology completely changed the fuel sender game.

You will note that a digital value of fuel is displayed below each quantity gauge.  This gives an unmatched accurate calculation of quantity in each tank.

Aerospace Logic has worked with us to incorporate appropriate warnings that a quality fuel level indication system can provide.

Note:  The upper display is indicating a fuel "Imbalance Condition"
and the flashing Amber bar is indicating you have exceeded the POH recommendations for fuel level imbalance. Switch to the flashing AMBER tank.

One of the most important characteristics of the Aerospace Logic Display is the trend graph featured on the second page.  This provides graphical information of fuel level over time.  The use of the displayed trend data makes it easier to manage fuel in a single engine aircraft.

Most importantly,  Aerospace Logic was willing to work with CIES in developing a display unit that would allow a digital interface between the display and fuel level sender.

Aerospace Logic and CiES Inc. look forward to pilot response for this system.

http://www.aerospacelogic.com

Press Release - TSO Granted - AOPA Summit

NEWS RELEASE                                    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CIES Corporation receives FAA TSO approval for new digital fuel level senders

October 10, 2012, CIES Corporation of Redmond, Oregon has received FAA TSO C55a approval for its line of digital fuel level senders. The float based fuel level senders are designed to replace the majority of the existing fuel level sending systems in general aviation aircraft. The proprietary and patented system provides a new level of accuracy, reliability, and stability to fuel level indication in the cockpit. CIES meets a TSO standard of 2% variance in tank volume, a standard normally reserved for corporate and commercial aircraft with corrected capacitive solutions. No other float based system meets this stringent TSO standard while achieving the intrinsically safe (i.e. “no wires in the tank”) requirement.

Richard Kirkness, Vice President of CIES said, "As a manufacturer of aircraft systems, we see FAA certification as critical to our success and the foundation for everything we do. FAA approval is the result of months of hard work on the part of our team here in Redmond and could not have come at a better time for CIES as the company continues to grow and strives to achieve the goal of becoming a world class supplier of advanced systems and technologies.”

Charlie Babb, General Manager of CIES added, “After the successful introduction at the beginning of this year of our senders on all new Cirrus production aircraft, we began working with other manufacturers and owners groups to provide specific fuel level sending solutions for production and legacy aircraft. The next logical step was to acquire FAA certification to validate our quality control system and lean manufacturing processes while making aircraft integration and approval significantly easier to obtain.”

The CIES fuel level senders require a dedicated digital fuel level display to ensure that the 2% accuracy achieved in the fuel tank is provided in the cockpit as well. As a result, CIES partnered with Aerospace Logic in Hamilton, Ontario to utilize their digital fuel level cockpit display. Aerospace Logic updated their fuel level gauging system to accept the digital communication link from the CIES digital senders.

CIES Corporation of Redmond, Oregon USA provides a range of high-technology products and support services to aviation, aerospace, and the broader transportation marketplaces.

For additional information on CIES and its products please visit the CIES Inc Website

For additional information on Aerospace Logic and its products please visit the Aerospace Logic Website

TSO C55a Approved Fuel Float Level Sensor

CIES Inc has obtained FAA TSO Approval - C55a - at the most rigorous standard for it's line of float based digital fuel level senders.

Its official we now are producing a line of TSO'd Fuel Level senders applicable to most aircraft below 12,500 lb gross weight. 

This effort provides a real alternative to the old Stewart Warner  senders long out of production for current General Aviation Aircraft fleet.

We are working with every major manufacturer to incorporate our senders as original equipment.