How to Check Fluids in an Airplane

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dave Pressy with St. Charles flying service on behalf of Expert Village. Another important aspect of the pre-flight is checking your fluids, your oil and your fuel. There's a door, access door right here. You want to check the condition and quantity of the engine oil. And right on cue it sticks. All right. There's a fuel tank in each wing so we want to go up on the wing here and check the fuel quantity visually. Step up. There you are. Another thing we want to check with the fuel is the condition, we're checking for any debris in the fuel or any water in the fuel. We do that by putting a fuel tester on it here. I want to siphon pulling the plunger and filling the fuel tester with some sample of the fuel from the lowest point in the fuel system. Again checking for debris and water in the fuel. Water is detected by a, you're going to see a bubble in the bottom of the fuel tester. Water is heavier than fuel so it will stay down at the bottom, similar to putting water in oil. They will not mix together so you will see water separated out at the bottom. You'll also see in this case there's a little bit of debris in that fuel as well. So we want to clean all that out before we fly. We're also going to check the condition of the fuel in each fuel tank. And there is a valve right here, we're going to depress that and fill this tester with fuel. Checking again also for the water and debris in the fuel. If there's any in there we'll just continue to check that until it runs clean."