sound asleep
There are many school of thoughts that it's ok to fail an engine before V1 OR wait until 400 feet and give yourself some safety margin.
This was an accident, no matter how you look at it. I can potentially see CASA regs being ammended re this type of training - either to mandate sim training and/or limiting simulated EFATO to a min altitude.
Sound asleep.
Not sure what you mean there.
V1 occurs whilst the a/c is still well and truly fixed to the runway, prior Vr, so if one were to suffer a failure prior to V1 then stopping on the runway is still an option, after V1 it is not. (Unless you are prepared for the potential risk of over running the R/W)
EFATO is a term more applicable to light twins or singles and such, that don’t fit into Transport Category performance criteria.
In a Transport Cat a/c the failure could actually occur before takeoff (before Vr) and with training one learns to deal with the failure and continue the takeoff. Hence the obvious benefits of being able to do this kind of training in a sim.
I do agree with your points about doing this exercise (in the real aeroplane) at a safe height.
I for one have never felt the need to do this exercise at or just after V1 but rather at a more comfortable 100-200 ft AGL so that if anything were to go pear shaped there was some margin for error. This doesn’t give the same experience as suffering a failure at V1 and controlling the a/c on the runway whilst waiting for Vr to occur before rotating and maintaining control and stabilising the a/c at V2 and positive rate.
Call me soft, but I never felt the likelihood of ever suffering such a failure is worth the risk of carrying out this exercise at 0 ft AGL; the Tamworth Metro crash brought that truth home to me.
FGD135
This is alarming. You were on the verge of being out of control. It could be said that you *were* out of control - given your continued problem with directional control.
Is this a frequent occurrence on these sorts of training flights? Is CASA aware of this?
Being on the verge of losing control, just a small hiccup (e.g. wind gust) would have put you out of control.
With the rapidly developing yaw and roll towards the dead engine, what then is the procedure? Is there an officially documented one?
You said that you "decreased power on the good engine". Is it possible that somebody could instead try to increase power on the "failed" engine - with a long spool-up time then making a crash inevitable?
In response to your questions FGD135, I only experienced this situation twice where I felt we were at the limit of controllability during a ‘critical’ engine failure and put it down to over pitching or over rotating and low speed.
I discussed it with my colleagues at the time and also with the Airframe ‘ginger beers’ and no one else had had a similar experience or reported such. I recall the ‘ginger beers doing a control rigging check and full control operation check but reported that everything was within limits, so I put it down to poor technique and the vagaries associated with different airframes. (Some just fly straighter than others)
The technique to recover from such a situation would be to increase speed if it was low by lowering pitch attitude and decreasing Tq on the live engine (which someone already pointed out is the below VMCA recovery procedure).
If control loss was imminent one could quickly advance the ‘failed’ power lever as with a PW118 series engine, from FI there is very little power lag.