Shrike Commander in Alaska crashed because it was fueled wrong.

It's even on the books in most states as "criminal negligence", meaning that the act that you are doing has great potential for harm if mishandled (anything from leaving the toddlers alone in the pool, shooting your gun into the air at the New Year, backing up a big truck in a school yard without a spotter, or refueling an airplane. Sort of an endless list; it's a "catch-all" law.)

Negligence can be criminalized by state statute and has been under certain circumstances. The vast bulk of negligence is based on common law and is a civil, not a criminal offense. The problem with criminalizing negligence is that the standard for negligence isn't much different than stupid, and for that, we have already turned the earth into one giant prison.
 
It's even on the books in most states as "criminal negligence", meaning that the act that you are doing has great potential for harm if mishandled (anything from leaving the toddlers alone in the pool, shooting your gun into the air at the New Year, backing up a big truck in a school yard without a spotter, or refueling an airplane. Sort of an endless list; it's a "catch-all" law.)
Here's the definition in one state:

A person acts with criminal negligence, or is criminally negligent, with respect to circumstances surrounding his conduct or the result of his conduct when he ought to be aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the circumstances exist or the result will occur.  The risk must be of such a nature and degree that the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the actor's standpoint.

But it's not an offense itself, it's a culpable state of mind. Criminally negligent homicide is an offense, a felony, that requires criminal negligence causing a death.

I don't think that's much question that misfueling an aircraft causes a substantial and unjustified risk of a crash and death. The question is whether the fueler's failure to ascertain and use the correct fuel was a gross deviation from the ordinary standard of care and whether it proximately caused the crash.
 
"The evaporation test is pretty good" That presumes you are using pure Jet A.
Well no, it doesn't... even fairly small kerosene contamination of avgas results in a stain on the evaporation from paper test.

I'm not confident that the evaporation test will detect a mix of Jet A and 100LL
Have you tried it? Aviation Consumer has... see their article on same. Even at 5% jet, they were able to distinguish by the evaporation-from-paper test, and IIRC the greasy fingers test. The sniff test was less sensitive.

It only took 10% to induce serious detonation.

Got a reference? We have have a real world test of 4,000 aviation engines from the 1994 avgas-contaminated-with-jet incident in California. None of those engines, with kerosene contamination up to 11% or so, showed signs of *serious* detonation.

running a JetA mix can cause serious physical damage to the engine.

Yes it can, which is why Chevron bought 4,000 new engines for folks... but they're understandably very liability averse. With the contaminated avgas in Australia which came later, ExxonMobil declined to buy people new engines. Both Fortune 5 companies are still in business.

"Jet A is about 50 octane" You're off by 100%. It's less than 25.

Got a reference? Note that I qualified my remark by speaking to MIXTURES of jet and avgas... jet is paraffinic, and has a pretty good lead response when combined with avgas. So the blending octane of jet with avgas is about 50.

Paul
 
Got a reference? Note that I qualified my remark by speaking to MIXTURES of jet and avgas... jet is paraffinic, and has a pretty good lead response when combined with avgas.
Just about every reference I have puts diesel at 10-25. I gave jeta the benefit of the doubt. I've seen engines torn apart because they were burning autogas (which you figure is in the 80's ). Here are the analytics: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880011760.pdf
It does refute my question as to the evaporation test. Very small levels are detectable that way.
 
In TX, the pilot of a 421 used for medevac signed the JetA fuel ticket and didnt catch the mistake.
That occurred in 2015 at Las Cruces, NM.
The Texas accident happened at San Antonio in 1994. The jet fuel truck did not have the duck bill nozzle installed. Line person claimed he fueled it with AVGAS but another employee saw him driving the Jet A fuel truck around the time of the refueling.
 
The Texas accident happened at San Antonio in 1994. The jet fuel truck did not have the duck bill nozzle installed. Line person claimed he fueled it with AVGAS but another employee saw him driving the Jet A fuel truck around the time of the refueling.

But the OP acknowledged his post was about the 2015 NM accident, not the SAT crash that happened 26 years ago.


In TX, the pilot of a 421 used for medevac signed the JetA fuel ticket and didnt catch the mistake.


That occurred in 2015 at Las Cruces, NM.


Right. The operator is out of Harlingen, TX, somehow that stuck with me.

The NTSB report for that one noticed that the duckbill nozzle is a voluntary industry standard, not a requirement.
 
Just about every reference I have puts diesel at 10-25. I gave jeta the benefit of the doubt.

Very different fuels, diesel fuel and jet/kerosine.

Hydrocarbon properties tend to group with their densities and boiling points...

Gasolines boil from 100F to 400F, roughly (there are complicating factors, and avgas is slightly lighter, end boiling point in the high 300's) and weigh ~6#/gallon

Jet fuel and kerosene boil from about 300F to 500F, and weigh 13% more than gasoline

Diesel fuel or salable gasoil boils from 350F to 650F (in western countries), and weigh 13% more than jet...

I've never worried about octane number of diesel, as that's pretty much a non-starter and not a common misfueling circumstance. Let's say we accept your 25 octane. Straight run gasoline is about 70 octane (depends highly on the crude oil composition... Arabian and California crudes are higher, Pennsylvania crudes are lower**)

If we interpolate across the range, that would give jet octane of about 50, which is what my experience blending gasoline for 38 years suggests.

The NASA study you cite has the same data blindness that the FAA exhibited a few years later, when they began the unleaded avgas study that lasted 20 years... they assumed all avgas was the same, and it is not... the composition varies significantly depending on the refining details of where it comes from... and they assumed that avgas properties matched the spec pretty much exactly. But, they do not... blenders always build in some give-away on properties, particularly avgas octane, to avoid surprises further down the supply chain.

The NASA study cites their experimentation with avgas and jet fuels, and even delves into the feasibility of GC in the field (gas chromatography). But in the 86 pages I perused, they don't define the starting points... what were the composition(s) of the avgas samples they were using? What were the compositions of the jet/kero samples they were using? Without knowing the starting points, the conclusions down the road are just random noise. Sad.

**Crude origin and refinery configuration make a big, significant difference! Although Lindbergh departed for Paris from New York, he didn't use gasoline from New Jersey refineries, just across the waterway... he imported gasoline from California. It wasn't because we're so much nicer folks out here... it's because Lindbergh's testing revealed that California gasoline had some as yet undefined property (octane rating) that allowed him to run leaner without his engine overheating (due to detonation). That's because straight-run California gasoline (and straight run was pretty much all that was available back then, very little molecule re-arranging chemistry and equipment available) has inherently higher octane, maybe as much as 10 octane numbers higher due to its naphthene content. He observed this by leaning at night and noticing when burning California gasoline, his cylinders didn't glow quite as brightly orange.

The NASA data suggests about 1 octane number loss for each 1% jet dilution into gasoline. That does not match any blend tables that I've looked at... I didn't bring thousands of blend tables with me into retirement (thankfully), but that correlation isn't consistent with the post-mortems from the 1994 4,000 engine misfueling incident either.

Paul
 
Very different fuels, diesel fuel and jet/kerosine.
Without going off topic too much...it's interesting they're "very different" fuels considering on the aviation side diesel fuels are approved alternates to jet fuels in a number of turbine engines. In these cases the main limiting factor for the alternates is based on ambient temps and the fuel freezing levels. For some OEMs the sulfur content is also limited. Plus it depends on the engine design/OEM whether there are additional mx requirements for alternate fuel use or time limits.
 
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It's even on the books in most states as "criminal negligence", meaning that the act that you are doing has great potential for harm if mishandled (anything from leaving the toddlers alone in the pool, shooting your gun into the air at the New Year, backing up a big truck in a school yard without a spotter, or refueling an airplane. Sort of an endless list; it's a "catch-all" law.)

You are describing recklessness. Perhaps the statutes use the word "negligence," but I would be surprised if the standard was actually negligence as that is generally understood in the law (failure to exercise reasonable care) vs. recklessness (conscious disregard of serious risk of harm). Granted, I don't practice criminal law, and I am not licensed in more than one state, so, I could certainly be surprised.
 
Very different fuels, diesel fuel and jet/kerosine.

Cannot be too very different. The DA42 is approved for Jet A or Automotive Diesel. When using diesel, there are temperature and altitude restrictions, however the performance tables remain the same.

Related side story: I was stationed on a USN oiler for three years. We carried 3M gallons of Distillate Fuel, Marine (DFM, AKA Marine Diesel) and 2M gallons of JP-5 (Military version of Jet A). Often were the times we would run out of DFM and pump JP-5 in its stead.
 
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