PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Tackling Engine Fire After Take Off in Multi Engine Heli
Old 18th Dec 2012, 15:33
  #14 (permalink)  
Fareastdriver
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: UK
Posts: 5,222
Likes: 0
Received 4 Likes on 3 Posts
That is why in Bristow we teach "nothing shut down below 500' except in case of a fire..."
....and it always has been that way....But at each stage; thottle closing; fuel shut off; there is a double check to assess whether the engine is actually on fire before you fire the bottle. When I started flying single jet fixed-wing aircraft engines disassembling on you was quite a common occurence and believe me you KNOW when a gas turbine catches fire.

I have had innumerable false fire warnings though I was never complacent enough to treat one automatically as a spurious warning but the overwhelming chances are that if there is a fire warning without any other signs of distress from the associated engine the worse thing you can have is a gas leak.

I had young 1st officer having kittens because we had had a fire light come on just after take off and I had just throttled the engine back whilst returning to the airfield. No point in having no engines if the other one decides to take a walk.

Years ago the RAF operated the Meteor as an advanced trainer. There was carnage because of the procedure of practising single engine recoveries with one engine shut down. If they had just ignored the possibility and told any pilot to bail out if he had an engine stop they could have saved hundreds of lives.

As previous posters have pointed out. Why construct your own crash when with a little bit of thought it's an incident.
Fareastdriver is offline