On Feb 17, 2004, at 2:29 PM, Peter L. Peres wrote:

>> Looking through the stats it seems that fires have been caused
>> simply by touching the refill cap. What on earth do you do about
>> that ? Get pre-filled tanks by mail order ?
>
> You touch the car body first, while turning away from it, and then NOT
> step (stay in the position you were in when you touched the body). If
> you
> work with flammable liquids you should do this anyway. Gasoline is not
> considered very flammable. Just try shortcuts wrt. static protection
> near
> anything that contains ether or acetylene or hydrogen or ....

Watch the folks at the local airport sometime during refueling.  The
aircraft are ALWAYS connected to the fueling vehicle or ground via a
long bare cable/wire and a clip.

Most fuelers will clip the wire to the exhaust stack on small aircraft
which is unpainted and provides a "decent" place to safely clip on to
the aircraft in aircraft that don't have dedicated grounding clip
points.

Of course, aircraft traveling in precipitation can build up quite a
nasty charge, and this was probably the cause of the early need for
this practice, but now it's standard-operating-procedure for ANY
fueling operation.

Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com

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