Feeding the planes

One of our ongoing tasks is keeping up with our fuel supply for the planes. For years, we had an underground tank (the one pictured above) that we filled up with Avgas (Aviation Gas). The fuel guys at the airport would deliver Avgas with a tractor to our hangar and pump it into this tank. We then had an electric pump to pump the fuel from the tank into our planes. A few years back, the pump and hose starting leaking quite a bit and we had lots of power cuts which made the electric pump unpractical. About the same time, we discovered that the fuel guys were emptying drums of Avgas into their tractor to deliver the fuel to us. They would then keep the empty drums and sell them. At that point, we decided to simply have them deliver the sealed drums to us with the Avgas inside. We bought a good hand drum pump and began refueling straight from the drums. We decommissioned the underground tank, dug it up and sold it. In the picture you can see the engineering feat of safely loading this large heavy tank into a trailer after we sold it.
When the 1st diesel plane arrived, we had another fueling dilemma. It uses Jet fuel, which is stored in huge tanks at the airport fuel depot and piped underground to refueling points on the ramp. The fuel guys can't deliver Jet fuel to us at our hangar. In order to keep a stock of Jet fuel on hand at our hangar, we converted some empty drums to use for Jet fuel. To get the fuel, we had to load 3 drums at a time into our van and take them to get filled up on the ramp. Unloading those full drums from the van at the hangar afterwards was always a risky proposition for our legs and toes. Only getting 3 drums at a time also meant that we had to get fuel quite often. The fuel guys didn't really like this system either as it was difficult to fill the drums in our van and they often spilled fuel in doing so.



After lots of brainstorming about a better solution, we finally decided on getting a fuel trailer for Jet fuel. Thanks to the sale of the underground tank and some donations from churches, we had enough funds to buy this fuel trailer. (The full costs of the trailer aren't covered yet, so if you'd like to donate towards the trailer let us know.) It arrived on a container in January and we've put it to work right away. The timing was great as we had friends visiting at the time who made trailer hitches for two of our SIMAIR vehicles to pull the new trailer. We can now pull the trailer to the ramp to get filled up. We're very thankful for this new tool. It has a battery operated pump and a 50 ft hose to easily reach our plane from where the trailer is parked.