Originally Posted by Astro14
Originally Posted by nthach
Say for instance a plane gets DEF contaminated fuel and it's caught in time before it makes it way to the engines and APU. If that airline doesn't have a maintenance base at that airport. What happens to the plane - will it get towed to a remote stand for a ground crew to remediate the problem?
If you found out about contaminated fuel before engine or APU start, you can de-fuel the airplane.
All that fuel becomes hazmat.
But I don't know if simply removing the contaminated fuel from the tanks is sufficient in this case. There is always a bit of "unusable" fuel. Some contaminated fuel is left in the tanks, then.
Somebody smarter than me, who works in maintenance, would be able to give you a better answer.
Well, I know that on the airplanes I work (Embraer ERJ), there's around 100-200 lbs of fuel left in the center tank (wing stub) after defueling. After defueling, we remove that last couple of hundred lbs. of fuel via 2 small drain valves on the underside of the wing stub.