Why can jets and helicopters do a midair refuel with their engines running while cars and trucks are supposed to turn their engines off when getting gas or diesel?
In: Other
Jets and helicopters don’t have a choice, midair refueling is risky in a variety of ways, far far more risky than fueling a car at a gas station
It comes down to likelihood, and occurrence rate.
For cars, we refuel them *a lot*. In the US there are 276 million motor vehicles (bikes to full trucks) in the US, even if they only fill up once a week that’s 14 billion opportunities a year for something to go wrong. If turning off the engine reduces the chances of a serious incident from 5 in a billion to 4 in a billion that’s 20% reduction in serious incidents from 70 per year to 56, that’s pretty significant even though the odds of any single incident are low
Even if aerial refueling is 1,000x riskier, we only do at most a few thousand refueling per year so the odds of an incident in a year would only be 5% at most (assuming 10k attempts per year)
Safety regulations are written in blood, every time there’s a rule someone generally died to cause it. Refueling with your engine on is unlikely to cause an issue for *you* but across the broader population it increases the risk that *someone* will have a fire
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