Originally Posted by
Big Pistons Forever
I think you are being a bit harsh. He had 104 seconds to deal with the emergency, and he did switch switch tanks. He was IMHO pretty forthcoming about his mistakes but the bottom line was he turned away from the runway that was right there
but was in reality reachable and flew the airplane to a successful forced landing instead of a stall-spin fatal with a destroyed airplane. No injury to him and an aircraft that will fly again, I am OK with that.
Do do you really think you would have done better ?
As a formation pilot you know the concentration required and your eyes are outside of the cockpit 99% of the time. When the engine quit the first time I would not have thought to much about it as the carburetor on the Merlin is downdraft and will do just that, if a negative "G" is put on it. On the second failure I would have immediately left the formation with a quick call, and been with eyes inside the cockpit checking oil pressure, fuel pressure and coolant temperature while establishing best glide and turning toward the airport. Remember Murphy's Law: In aviation whatever can go wrong, will go wrong and will usually get worse. In this case he continued to try to stay in the formation wasting precious evaluation time of the situation. Assuming all the tricks to get the engine running failed, the pilot should have put the propeller at full low pitch to help extend the glide and concentrated on flying the aircraft; not taking advice from the tower. Watching the video it should have been possible to preform a successful landing, in my opinion. I had two engine failures with the Merlin, one while at altitude; no problem. The other just after take-off and that was much more interesting. And, it both instances no damage to the aircraft, only engine repairs.