A300
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Troubleshooting
Aircraft Equipment Problem Less Severe; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy; Inflight Event / Encounter Fuel Issue
Flight Crew Overcame Equipment Problem
Aircraft
At cruise we received an ECAM alert that indicated we had LOW FUEL in the left outer (LO) tank. That tank showed to be full (8.2). We ran the QRH and it directed us to use our inner; center and trim fuel in the manual mode and then open the cross feed and burn from our outers until landing. We notified Maintenance Control of our issue and assumed they would forward the information to Maintenance (MX). WE WERE WRONG...THEY DID NOT. As the center and inner tanks ran empty the outer tanks began to feed. We soon noticed that the LO tank was not really showing an indication of consumption. The split between the outer tanks began to approach the balance limits. We were approximately 80 miles out and had no choice but to let the tanks continue to feed the way they were and leave the cross feed open. The split began to go out of limits as we requested direct to the final approach fix and min delay. We had to adjust the trim a couple of times; which indicated we may actually not be burning fuel out of the LO.We landed with 7.8 in the LO and 4.8 in the RO. ASSUMING MX had been told about out problem we blocked in and shut down the engines. Before MX came to talk to us they began to move fuel around in the tanks. This prevented us or MX from being able to determine if we actually had a tank that didn't feed or if we just had an indicator issue. I recommended to the captain taking the plane from me that he not take the aircraft unless he could get enough fuel in the Inner tanks to get him back without using either of the outer tanks. If the LO tank was in fact NOT burning fuel we landed with less than 5000 LBS of useable fuel. But we may never know now. It was good fortune that I added 3000 LBS of fuel to the release.
Air Carrier Captain reported a problem with the fuel tank distribution system resulting in near out of balance limits. Flight landed without incident.