mmmmmm ..
I've had a runaway prop during the landing flare ... fortunately, even if procedurally very inappropriate, the FE had it identified and the handle pulled before we two knew quite what was going on (as I recall, he only said one word at the time ... and that was said quite loudly with an interesting cadence) .. it was a bit hard to work out exactly what the yaw sequence was.. certainly the yaw was significant.. more so than, for instance, landing with an outer feathered on the same aircraft .. which I had following a oil cooler problem. Had a decouple on another occasion .. but that is a bit different to a runaway ..
Following on from BPF's comments ... presuming that we are talking about a governor failure of some sort here for a light twin, I would have expected that the runaway would involve an increase (and, for a big engine, especially a direct drive turboprop .. this is quite a significant increase) in drag and, consequently, an alarming yaw to the side of the runaway.
Consider two instances where this drag increase is the case ..
(a) many larger prop units have either autofeather or autocoarsen systems to minimise the yaw associated with the governor trying to maintain RPM by fining the blade angle.
(b) some SE tug/jump pilots (and I was guilty of this as a youngster) descend with a very coarse prop setting and then use the pitch control (towards fine) as a defacto airbrake to help slow down on (short) final ... a bit like running into a brick wall. As an aside, do pilots on singles with CSU pull full coarse for a forced landing ? .. always seemed sensible to me and reduces the descent rate by a few hundred feet per minute.
If this is a general situation, then I would have expected the aircraft experiencing a runaway to yaw towards the runaway and the pilot's initial interpretation (noise notwithstanding) to be similar to a straight fuel failure. Or did I miss something important somewhere along the way ?
.. I do think that "The Scene" has a VERY important message for us all in respect of the need for sitting on hands while the brain is given time to engage ... may I relate a tale in a similar vein ? ... on a recent sim endorsement session, I had set up
(a) a gear fire sometime after takeoff .. which had been handled appropriately
(b) then, during the subsequent RTB with the gear down and still well within the nominated gear cooling period ... a predictable miss on short final ... followed by a not entirely surprising engine failure during the early climb ... the crew observed that things weren't going terribly well (with the gear still down). Eventually the penny dropped and the gear was selected up .. that being an alternative preferable to the increasing likelihood of impending death.
To emphasise the need for lateral thinking (as opposed to mindless following of the standard checklists), the gear fire warning, naturally enough, came on again. The trainee captain, who was doing a good stick and rudder job at the time and working pretty hard, wasn't quick enough to stop the (very keen) FO from dropping the gear (checklist item) and, first time politely, directed that it be retracted.
After another fire warning and a similar sequence of events, the trainee captain made a quite impolite comment to the (very keen) FO and the problem went away. As a result, the FO, I suspect, hopefully learnt a useful lesson about doing things too quickly without enough thought .. not to mention the need for crew co-ordination.
I never cease to be amazed at just how much I learn from the back of the cab by watching what others do under high workload.
[ 02 January 2002: Message edited by: john_tullamarine ]</p>