Meteor at Kirkcaldy
John Farley at 19:48 last.
I know nothing of the accident except the previous posts. The news report is quite clear that the aircraft landed by the well known hotel outside Kirkcaldy. By my ruler, that is 18 NM on the centreline of what is now Leuchars’ 04 runway. Pace Colin Cummings, that is not in the circuit and not even near enough to start getting into circuit pattern configuration.
Your quote calls to all our minds the notorious Phantom Dive and I suggest you have too quickly given into the temptation to accept this report of another far-too-common circuit accident.
Except Withey was not in the circuit.
My conjectures of 17 December 2007 mostly stand. Taking to be true as much of Cummings’ story as we can, we now forget my suggestions that the aircraft was out of radio contact and that he had gone up to min safe altitude. We can also assume that the airman in the back had to hold onto his suitcase because the Hunter spare part had taken up the (not very big) space in the radio compartment that Henry Crun (17 November 2007 02:28) mentioned.
Withey gets permission to do a practice single engine landing. That suggests obviously that he has been doing the transit on one. An important fact about the single engine transit is that if the other engine is idling, you lose most of the fuel saving. So Withey is probably on one for real.
By the time I did my training three years later, to do a practice asymmetric landing meant having both engines running, but with one idling. If Withey was going to do an approach with both engines running, it would have been ever so much easier to do it the usual way rather than in the practice asymmetric mode.
Air Traffic would not accept an authentic single-engine approach except in a declared emergency. Withey seems not to have declared an emergency. It seems to me that he would be on one engine because he was short of fuel - and that he planned to land on one because he was desperately short of fuel. It would be a small and understandable part of this story if he calculated that telling ATC of his self-induced emergency would not help him with his problem and would make certain an unpleasant interview on Monday morning.
With twenty miles to go, his live engine winds down. If he accepts that and thinks he might have fuel available to the other engine, he would try to start that. In the meantime he is losing airspeed. He is fighting the rudder load appropriate to the engine that just died; it takes quite a number of turns to wind that off. He has to wind on the same amount in the opposite direction if his other engine lights up – which only happens if he has a spare hand to operate the HP cock, and the button on the end of it, in just the right way.
Managing the rudder in the ordinary asymmetric situation is very demanding of your leg muscles if you could not (as I could) lock your leg over-centre at the knee. In that way you were able to fix the rudder at full deflection for as long as necessary. As I see it turning out for Withey, he should initially have held the rudder central against full left or right trim; to do this he could not lock his leg but would have to hold his leg bent at the knee. Maybe he was not (and maybe I would not have been) strong enough to hold that position. If then the second engine lit, perhaps he had to lock full rudder against full opposite trim.
All this to keep the ball in the centre … but perhaps he found too little time to look at the turn-and-slip at all. Perhaps he is really running out of airspeed … and has not given himself time to see that either.
The Phantom Dive was remarkable because a Meteor at normal circuit speed would roll and plunge to the ground. There is sadly nothing remarkable about any aircraft doing that if it is yawing when it stalls.