Skylane 182/RG Turbo Skylane/RG
Flight Crew Commercial
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 10; Flight Crew Total 1200; Flight Crew Type 800
Workload; Time Pressure; Situational Awareness; Distraction; Confusion
Aircraft Equipment Problem Less Severe; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural FAR; Inflight Event / Encounter Fuel Issue
Flight Crew Inflight Shutdown; Flight Crew Took Evasive Action
Aircraft; Human Factors
[This was a] skydiving flight; fuel exhaustion on final approach to land. Pattern and approaches are always done very high; so some of the flaps were retracted; and a gliding landing was easily made. Fueling was done for these 3 skydiving flights after flying the airplane from the home airport to the airport where the skydiving took place. Fuel was checked in both tanks before leaving the home airport; and I mentally noted that one tank contained more fuel than the other; and that I had plenty of fuel to fly to the skydiving airport; and would get fuel there even if I did not fly skydivers. I think the reason this happened is that I forgot which of the tanks had the greater amount of fuel when checking fuel at the home airport. I therefore filled the tank that was already the most full; and did not have the reserve in the other tank as expected; because I did not specifically check it after filling the other tank. This also might have never been noticed if I had not used a steep bank from base to final. There is a large amount of unusable fuel in early model C182's; especially if steep banks are performed at lower fuel levels.
A C182 engine quit on final approach from fuel starvation after the pilot flew three skydiving flight and forgot that the selected tank did not have sufficient reserve fuel after using the other wing's full tank.