Creampuff says, correctly;
The old POHs should not say “LOP operations are not recommended”. They should say “There are some very good ways of getting your engine to run at its best, but we haven’t fitted the instruments for you to know if you are. Consequently, we’d like to hedge our risk by getting you to use that cheap AVGAS stuff to keep our cylinders cool – thanks.”
Unless you have "the instruments" the argument is academic.
Others including
Jet_A_Knight get the time/temp message.
It's the time since you had any power sufficient to "work" the turbos that is significant not the time on the ground, i.e. if you get your profile right that could mean from way back in the descent somewhere or when you had to rescue the landing with big burst.
AND
Stabilised CHT/EGT temps circa 300 deg F or whatever.
Anything else, as Woomera says, outside the POH is just the usual aero club bar/guru nonsense.
Oh and CASA "approved" pretty much follows the old IT mantra, sh!t in = sh!t out.
Some moons ago I had an urgent call from a distraught mining comany Managing Director, whose staff had just been involved in the closest thing to death they would likely ever experience, simultaneously with a CAA FOI, both asking how much fuel would be required blah blah to complete a specific flight and the load available, blah blah.
It took me less than 2 minutes to give em the result, shocked silence from both.......then the ususal "that can't be right"
.......followed by ...."well you asked the question if you already knew the answer why bother" followed by...."why do you ask". The firies were still cleaning up the mess at Perth.
C421C, aircraft departs with 10 POB (9 x 100kg drillers) and toolboxes for around 600nm direct flight inbound to Perth, suffers failure of remaining alternator, the other had failed outbound, dodgy to nonexistent coms for the last two thirds of the flight, overflys no less than 4 perfectly adequate strips with fuel,
runs out of fuel on short finals and lands wheels up. No physical injuries but many of the passengers required long term counselling and would, not surprisingly, refuse any further FIFO work.
If one knows the approach to R24 then one can only contemplate the horrors and inevitable consequences of a dead stick into the hills prior.
Believe it or not = TRUE.
How?? Dodgy Bros charter company wins work against bona fide competitor due price and "ability" to operate non stop with the "same" load in the same type albeit with dodgy maintenance, sounding familiar no.
The "load chart" was "approved" using 77kg std pax, the operator was double dipping the 4 kg hand baggage allowance included in the std pax weight to lay of against the real baggage and so on. Hey these kids should get to run Telstra
The "approved" fuel flows and flight planning fuels were fantasy land and must have been worked back from the dodgy pax and freight weights to "balance out".
There was no POH or power computer on board beyond the CAA Flight Manual with the weights etc.
No mention anywhere in the OPs Manual of alternator failure issues and so on.
All duly "approved".
The outbound alternator failure on it's own is normally cause to ground the aircraft and other arrangements made for the pax.
Of course when the whole load is then put on the remaining equally old alternator for the return it promptly says barlees and rolls over shortly after TO on climb outbound and the battery is following fast.
Our hero decides no biggie
its sorta VFR daytime so lets keep going, we can't afford to put the pax on the RPT nor recover the aircraft from 600nm from base, so lets just keep going and make it up as we go along.
Now if the pilot in the stress and confusion had remembered to complete his checklists and properly leaned for the climb and cruise and not left it at full rich he may well have made it. Which is why he ran out of fuel at the vinegar stroke.
Now, a short lesson on geared engines and geared alternators. There's several ways an alternator can fail on one of these, internal electrical fault, internal bearing/shaft failure or failure at the gearbox end.
There is no way of telling from the cockpit other than it's offline.
For all but the first instance, alternator failure can have knock on consequences to the engine by taking out the gearbox, to which the engine and prop is attached altogether.
Not pretty.
Recommended practise is to land real soon and call the RAC.
But hey, now we have the hero flying an aircraft with BOTH alternators out.
Back to our hero, we are now well and truly into our
fixed reserves and likely to land on fumes as we pass overhead the last airport with fuel, but hey even that is too expensive so lets keep going.
Mental state of the pilot is exhibited by the pax in the RHS decamping to the rear baggage step, which wouldn't have helped the C o G but I guess that was sorta offset by the 110kg tool box in the nose.
This was one of the pax who required big time counselling
Engines spluttering on short final, shut down one, I think, the other threatening, it might have given up too, stuff up gear extension, no hydraulics and emergency extension, fails to pull the gear breaker before selecting blow down
and he does the only smart thing in the whole flight.
He dead sticks the aircraft more or less under control, gear hanging unlocked onto the ground
With the possible exception of the alternator issues all of the rest in terms of fuel and load were as per the "approved" Ops Manual.
I've the forgotten the denouement in terms of regulatory action but it was a bit of a stand off in finding any operations that weren't specifically approved
and I seem to recall every body called it quits.
Fortunately for the industry Dodgy Bros went broke or went on to bigger things in airlines and the CAA learnt that the factory POH is remarkably accurate, as when I was eventually apprised of the actual fuel on board and other bits of the scenario I was able to show that the engines would quit pretty much on schedule and where they ultimately did. It wasn't rocket science.
AND that even with proper fuel handling they must have been landing with less than 30 minutes fuel, AND any way they cut it they were always 100s of kg overweight.
The POH and power computer probably were as is usually the case in the Chief Pilots top drawer, consigned as manufacturers puff advertising material.
Luck seems to favour the innocent.