Fuel consumption

Hi, I'm wondering how much fuel is used for an hour long flight from start up to shut down. Assuming that afterburner is used only during take-off.

Is it a must for an F-16 to land with empty external fuel tanks for safety reasons?

That depends on the weight and weather and many other things.....

He has no other choice but to land with the external tanks empty as they are the first tanks to become empty (normal flight of course). I can give you my observations on the fuel usage but it would depend largely on the configuration of the aircraft and the mission they were flying.

Clean (no external tanks) flying a 1.0 mission they wouldn't even have to use the A/B for a takeoff and they might use some where in the neighborhood of 700-900 gallons of fuel. But as I said it depends largely on what they are doing for a mission, Air to air they use the A/B more than they would for an A/G mission.

Like said before, it all depends on the config and weather but maybe this will put it in perspective. An F-16 with external wing tanks 120's on wing tips aim 9 on sta. 2 and acmi pod on sta. 8 starts out with about 12000-12300
lbs. of fuel and with a 1hr flight it comes back with 3000-3500 lbs. ( a little math for ya for converting lbs. to gallons is 1gal x 7 = lbs.) so 10 gal. is about 70 lbs.