Controls Question - Fuel Tanks

[PROXIMVS]

I learned the hard way that in this version of the game one must manage your fuel tanks manually when I ran out of fuel after a gunnery drill flying back to Y-29 from the area of Bonn during a nap-of-the-earth flight.  The engine cut out, I looked at the fuel gauge and saw the auxiliary tank was empty.  Not knowing how to switch tanks at the time I had to end the flight.  Lesson learned.

Since then, I have set the controls that seemed to switch the tanks but have since discovered none of them switch the tanks and I have now landed on fumes at Y-29 several times after repeated attempts to switch to the main tank en route from Bonn after a gunnery drill.

Which is the command that switches tanks?  I have several times prowled the control settings:

Switch to Next Fuel Selector

Next Fuel Pump

Turn Chosen Fuel Selector

None of them switches fuel tanks.  I had no problem doing this on long range sorties in CFS 2.  How do you switch fuel tanks in this game?

 

Edited May 14 by PROXIMVS

[Skycat1969]

What aircraft? I don't think you can manage the fuel manually, that it is based on percent of total fuel load. Auxiliary will drain after the main tanks, I believe. In some aircraft you'll see the selector switch toggle back and forth between main tanks to maintain load balance.

There was some behind-the-scenes testing for drop tanks that never got implemented, and that's about when the fuel selector and drop tank release commands were added to the key binds list.

[BlitzPig_EL]

There is no fuel tank management in Great Battles.  If you are running out you didn't take enough to start with.

All you can do is go to economical cruise settings when transiting from your airfield to the combat zone and back.

In US planes go to "Auto Lean" mixture, pull back on the prop pitch to lower engine rpm, and pull back on the throttle to lower the manifold pressure.

If you are in a 109, well, good luck with that,  lack of range was always the Achilles heel of the European point defense interceptors. 

[Kubert]

4 hours ago, BlitzPig_EL said:

If you are in a 109, well, good luck with that,

0.8 ata is fine for economical cruise in 109 for the longest missions. 

Edited May 15 by Kubert

[AndreiTomescu]

8 hours ago, Skycat1969 said:

Auxiliary will drain after the main tanks

it's the other way around: first the auxiliary, then the main ones. Like in the Mustang: with a full auxiliary, no acrobatics/dogfight. So the first fuel that is consumed is from the AUX. to conserve fuel the manual prop pitch is very useful, and also boost/ata to min. obviously this has to be related to a min cruise speed , that it's also altitude dependent.

[PROXIMVS]

I am training primarily using the P-47D-28, and that is the aircraft I was flying when I ran out of fuel.  The time I ran out of fuel the gauge showed the Auxiliary was empty, but the Main was at 100%.  It's the same each time I have landed on fumes: Auxiliary on fumes, Main at 100%.  I had taken a full fuel load: right now since I am conducting my gunnery drills against an AI Novice I do not bother with reducing the amount of fuel; I'll worry about that when I am facing more skilled opposition.  The P-47 was relatively short-ranged, but the flight from Bonn to Asche I do not think is a particularly long distance.  After I have downed the AI aircraft I typically enjoy a nap-of-the-earth flight west to the Meuse through the rough terrain between Bonn and the Meuse.  When I reach the Meuse, I turn north and RTB.  I was maybe halfway to the Meuse from the area of Bonn during the sortie when the auxiliary ran dry and the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp shut off.

So, it looks like something weird is going on. It seems the main tank is useless. 

[Kubert]

Stupid question:

Are you sure your plane was out of fuel? Couldn't that be engine damage due to overuse of combat power? Because, P-47's combat power has 15 minutes time limit, which is ca. distance between Asch and Bonn(plus fighting) and it also eats fuel as crazy, which could empty one of your tanks.

[Dash,Polder]

All you have control over in Great Battles is the fuel indicator selector far as fuel systems, so you can read the gauges at will.  It used to cycle the selector automatically every few seconds, but now you can control it directly.  That was a real improvement because who has time to look down and wait 90 seconds for it to cycle when flying in combat.  The Fw-190 has one fuel gauge with four separate tank indications, so four positions of the selector switch.

Good news, there's video of an F-80's tanks being jettisoned over Korea, doesn't make much sense not having control over fuel source selection with those functional.

[PROXIMVS]

2 hours ago, Kubert said:

Stupid question:

Are you sure your plane was out of fuel? Couldn't that be engine damage due to overuse of combat power? Because, P-47's combat power has 15 minutes time limit, which is ca. distance between Asch and Bonn(plus fighting) and it also eats fuel as crazy, which could empty one of your tanks.

That could be a possibility.  Though, I did not hear the engine making strange sounds and on the return flight my throttle is typically at 75%, and the engine cut with the Auxiliary at empty, but maybe that was just a coincidence.  I have flown from Y-29 to the Scheldt Estuary and back and did not run out of fuel.  I'll try to take the time to experiment with a long flight.

[PROXIMVS]

Thanks for the help to everyone.

[Leifr]

5 hours ago, PROXIMVS said:

I am training primarily using the P-47D-28, and that is the aircraft I was flying when I ran out of fuel.  The time I ran out of fuel the gauge showed the Auxiliary was empty, but the Main was at 100%.  It's the same each time I have landed on fumes: Auxiliary on fumes, Main at 100%.  I had taken a full fuel load: right now since I am conducting my gunnery drills against an AI Novice I do not bother with reducing the amount of fuel; I'll worry about that when I am facing more skilled opposition.  The P-47 was relatively short-ranged, but the flight from Bonn to Asche I do not think is a particularly long distance.  After I have downed the AI aircraft I typically enjoy a nap-of-the-earth flight west to the Meuse through the rough terrain between Bonn and the Meuse.  When I reach the Meuse, I turn north and RTB.  I was maybe halfway to the Meuse from the area of Bonn during the sortie when the auxiliary ran dry and the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp shut off.

So, it looks like something weird is going on. It seems the main tank is useless. 

You must be misreading a gauge, or setting something incorrectly prior to loading the flight. You have well over an hour of flight time in the P47 with full tanks.

Are you running in auto-rich for the duration of the flight? You can scratch out more flight-time running lean when not in combat.

The fuel gauge is single, but there are split needles for main/aux. When the red fuel light appears, you have approximately fifteen additional minutes of fuel remaining if you are considerate - empty on the gauge indicates forty US.Gal remaining.

[Skycat1969]

[AndreiTomescu]

Now, only relative related with the topic on hand (P-47) but also concerning fuel tanks/consumption: in the IAR80/81 the fuel gague/sensor were quite faulty (in real life, not ingame) because they were poorly built.

The pilots never used the fuel indicator for that. They used their....watch! The rule was: 1h45min from take off to engine stop due to lack of fuel.

[PROXIMVS]

On 5/15/2026 at 10:31 AM, Kubert said:

Stupid question:

Are you sure your plane was out of fuel? Couldn't that be engine damage due to overuse of combat power? Because, P-47's combat power has 15 minutes time limit, which is ca. distance between Asch and Bonn(plus fighting) and it also eats fuel as crazy, which could empty one of your tanks.

You were spot-on correct. 👍

I just completed a second flight to the Scheldt Estuary, climbing to an altitude of Angels 27,5.  The Auxiliary ran dry on the return route to Y-29 and the aircraft automatically switched to the Main Tank.  Sortie took 1 hour and just over 5 minutes.  I still had most of the fuel in the main after my landing.

So, clearly in that Gunnery Drill I had fried my engine chasing that FW-190A8 and it failed just coincidentally right after the auxiliary ran dry.  Still odd that I had not noted the engine making any peculiar sound.  Maybe it was and I just did not notice, being new to this version.

[Leifr]

If you were flying on the deck and engaged in a fight, it's very likely that you overboosted the manifold without realising and cooked the engine. It takes a couple of minutes at most for this to happen, so it's something to keep in mind.

[PROXIMVS]

On 5/15/2026 at 3:15 PM, Leifr said:

You must be misreading a gauge, or setting something incorrectly prior to loading the flight. You have well over an hour of flight time in the P47 with full tanks.

Are you running in auto-rich for the duration of the flight? You can scratch out more flight-time running lean when not in combat.

The fuel gauge is single, but there are split needles for main/aux. When the red fuel light appears, you have approximately fifteen additional minutes of fuel remaining if you are considerate - empty on the gauge indicates forty US.Gal remaining.

No, I know the gauges in the Jug.  I have been flying P-47's all the way back to Jane's WW II Fighters and in the original version of this game, when it expanded to include them, P-47's were one of my most common rides on-line.  I'm only new to this version of the game.

My landings are beginning to look consistently professional, three-point landings with little or no bounce: the landing I just did was no bounce at all.  I am beginning to judge the distances better: one of the first things in any new flightsim is learning to gauge distances by eye.  In the original version I had a mission for each air force with distance markers on the approach to the runway so that as I passed them I knew how far the end of the runway was.  Cannot do that in this version.

[PROXIMVS]

10 minutes ago, Leifr said:

If you were flying on the deck and engaged in a fight, it's very likely that you overboosted the manifold without realising and cooked the engine. It takes a couple of minutes at most for this to happen, so it's something to keep in mind.

The AI pilot does not like to go down there at all, 😂.  He's usually at least 1,000' up or more.  I just had the engine at full power too long.  The NOE part happens when I'm RTB, flying below treetop height, splattering my cockpit with water over rivers and such.  It's just fun.

23 hours ago, Skycat1969 said:

Thank you for that 👍

Even though I am already very familiar with flying P-47's, that has a lot of good info.

[PROXIMVS]

23 hours ago, AndreiTomescu said:

Now, only relative related with the topic on hand (P-47) but also concerning fuel tanks/consumption: in the IAR80/81 the fuel gague/sensor were quite faulty (in real life, not ingame) because they were poorly built.

The pilots never used the fuel indicator for that. They used their....watch! The rule was: 1h45min from take off to engine stop due to lack of fuel.

Still interesting, though.  I did not know that about the I.A.R..  But, you're Romanian, so it does not surprise me that you do 🙂

[Skycat1969]

8 hours ago, PROXIMVS said:

I have been flying P-47's all the way back to Jane's WW II Fighters and in the original version of this game, when it expanded to include them, P-47's were one of my most common rides on-line.  I'm only new to this version of the game.

Funny you mentioned Jane's WWII Fighters. I launched the game last night for nostalgia's sake and flew the museum's P-47D ground attack mission. 

Back in 1999, I had barely flown any air combat games before Jane's WWII Fighters. The Thunderbolt quickly became my favorite and ignited a passion for not only the WWII air combat game genre, but also for learning all I could about the Thunderbolt and its history. I flew it a lot in Forgotten Battles and CFS-3, and I was a Kickstarter contributor to the DCS Normandy 1944 project just to get the Thunderbolt made. I'm really looking forward to the upcoming P-47M Collector Plane ... and as strange as this may seem, I hope there is an option to fly it as a late P-47D-30 or D-40 as well.

Edited May 17 by Skycat1969

[PROXIMVS]

9 hours ago, Skycat1969 said:

Funny you mentioned Jane's WWII Fighters. I launched the game last night for nostalgia's sake and flew the museum's P-47D ground attack mission. 

Back in 1999, I had barely flown any air combat games before Jane's WWII Fighters. The Thunderbolt quickly became my favorite and ignited a passion for not only the WWII air combat game genre, but also for learning all I could about the Thunderbolt and its history. I flew it a lot in Forgotten Battles and CFS-3, and I was a Kickstarter contributor to the DCS Normandy 1944 project just to get the Thunderbolt made. I'm really looking forward to the upcoming P-47M Collector Plane ... and as strange as this may seem, I hope there is an option to fly it as a late P-47D-30 or D-40 as well.

Jane's was my first flightsim as well.  I strafed one of the running deer once in a P-47 and discovered they were bulletproof deer.  I liked the fact the mission builder had triggers, which made it possible for me in my training flights following a flight leader in the Luftwaffe to have a random possibility of having run-ins with prowling P-51's.  But, I had to turn off mid-air collision due to the propensity of AI pilots to run into one another.  I remember during a major Circus mission in which all of my pilots would be flying in turn, after the rendezvous of all the Allied flights during the first flight, my P-47D pilot, I looked back and saw a rain of streaks of flaming aircraft arcing to the ground.  I also liked the interviews with Gabreski, Rall and Krupinski.   Gabreski and Rall were both very pleasant people to hear speaking.

1 minute ago, PROXIMVS said:

Jane's was my first flightsim as well.  I strafed one of the running deer once in a P-47 and discovered they were bulletproof deer.  I liked the fact the mission builder had triggers, which made it possible for me in my training flights following a flight leader in the Luftwaffe to have a random possibility of having run-ins with prowling P-51's.  But, I had to turn off mid-air collision due to the propensity of AI pilots to run into one another.  I remember during a major Circus mission in which all of my pilots would be flying in turn, after the rendezvous of all the Allied flights during the first flight, my P-47D pilot, I looked back and saw a rain of streaks of flaming aircraft arcing to the ground.  I also liked the interviews with Gabreski, Rall and Krupinski.   Gabreski and Rall were both very pleasant people to hear speaking.

I am also looking forward to the arrival of the P-47M; 473 MPH aircraft!