Engine Failure Drills

[Angelīs One Fife]

Chuck Ellsworth

You should consider whether you are the right person to be instructing ME training. What tosh are you talking about; that because you could not unfeather the engine you nearly bought the farm. You still no doubt had one engine to carrry out the approach and landing on and if all else failed, aircraft will still glide you know.

Your drawing a comparison between experiencing an feathering of the prop and of flying above VNE is just utter nonsense. Flying intentionally above VNE is structurally unsafe whereas flying a multi on one engine has no structural implications at all and if you are not demonstrating to your students that the aircraft flies exactly the same on one as it does on two or three then again you are missing out a huge amount of their training. Flying on one engine is not about looking at a stationanry prop it is about experiencing the handling characteristics and as such is a great confidence building exercise.

It is no doubt poor instructing in ME flying that leads to poor accident statistics for MEP in the Americas that leads to people thinking that it is better to fly SET public transport.

"Each of us must decide where our comfort and safety limits are and using that baseline develop a system of instruction that teaches the student the art of flying ,... safely,... that I have tried to do during my career and so far my students have demonstrated that they have what it takes to grab the bull by the balls in an emergency and pull that feather lever, or push that button for their first look at a feathered propellor, but only when there is a reason to do so.. "

Rubbish. It is not grabbing a bull by the balls just to feather an engine; it is a piece of piss and easy as pie. Making your student think it is grabbing a bull by the balls is just gung ho he man ignorance of the plain and simple fact that it is no big deal to be flying on one engine. The only problem in feathering a piston is doing it too slowly. Because your poor student will not be used to seeing it and be too busy worrying about whether the aircraft will fly or not then it could be argued they may act too slowly. And as I am sure you know wait too long and let the rpm get too low and you will never get it feathered. Then they really will will be scraming Mayday but a fat lot of good it will get them unless the aircraft has major excess power.