Engine failures...

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

I'm sure many of your old timers have had a donkey die or two - i'd be interested to hear your account of the situation, the final result and what you'd have done differently if you could have done it again. Thanks guys.

[SASless]

TFS....

Only one that stands out really....Hughes 500D coming off the top of Mount Neuhauser near Tok, Alaska.....just at dark....early fall. Cleared the mountain....got well away....9800 feet up....or so....one big BANG! and we were in a very quiet machine. Got it down without a mark on it....landing in a very small relatively open spot....mashing down the pussy willow bushes for a cushion.

What would I have done different....not poop my pants probably. For sure....the next time I smell the aroma of "burnt" oil coming from the breather.....I am going to get the engineers involved. Also...9800 feet is way too high for that kind of sillyness!

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

So what altitude did you get on the terra firma? Did you notice a considerable difference in the ROD as you descended from up there?

[giveitsome]

Flying Squizza

Had a Donkey die upwind from a RWY Environment at 200 ft approx 35 kts in a multi eng machine. Low AUW and 10 kts of breeze on the nose made life very easy with no obstacles in the overshoot. No room to abort Adjusted PWR & ATT( lowered coll, attained V MIN D and flew away). Later inspection found problem with O rings on HMU (problem with T-700 GE Eng, Analogue ECU).

This emerg manifested itself exactly as per SIM TRG and was fairly low stress on the stress meter. Had it happend the planned hour later we would have been at 19,500 lbs AUW taking off from a pad that was 4500 ft high with 200-250 ft trees in the overshoot (the initial emerg stopped us from continuing with the planned sortie), so I guess some times you can be lucky.

Not much of a soggy brown underpants storie I know but ENG Fail none the less. This is something I think about a lot flying the B2 for a news channel (moonlighting) when I am in the high OGE HVR filming a storie over the CBD with very few places to go.

I would be interested to hear similar stories of an ENG fail/low side fail over the CBD from 0kts to near no SPD at the high hover close to max AUW and high DA.

Blue Skies.

GIS

:ok:

[Brian Abraham]

#1 S-76C, 12 degrees C, 11200 lbs, 11 souls, 20 knots wind - massive explosion (well it seemed like it at the time - hot end failure) at CDP on a platform take off. Deck 100 ft AMSL, copilot says he saw 5 feet on the radalt above water as we accelerated away. Nr drooped to 91% with N1 pegged at 102.7 before milking it back up. Cabin filled with smoke and that hot, hot metal smell. Turned out to be an easy exercise in retrospect but certainly not at the time. Put the success down to simulator partly, but mainly to our C & T people who as part of base checks pull one at 100 foot hover and have you fly away/land on runway however it plays out (throttle of "good" engine previously set so that you are just light on wheels with that engine - some will argue its hanging yourself out there with such a practice but none of our pilots have mentioned any qualms and is the best of training if you want to risk it)

#2 Stinking hot day (about 35C I think) 76C and 50 or so pounds short of gross for the conditions. In hover trimming engines prior to take off when a soft "pop" was heard and aircraft settled gracefully to the runway with the ITT of failed engine at 1000C - hot end again and same aircraft as before but other engine and no, this engine was not installed at time of previous failure. No cabin smoke this time

[Gaseous]

How about a self induced one?

Enstrom, in cruise, leaned off. About to descend at which point one normally returns to full rich. Unfortunately brain trouble strikes and mixture goes full lean followed by stunned silence. At this point right hand on mixture, left hand on cyclic, no hand on collective and rpm heading south quick.:oh:

Fortunately the brain recovered, autorotation established and the engine was succesfully restarted in the air which requires significant juggling of controls.

Wife beat me around the head but other than that, no harm done.

Anyone who messes with the lean knob should be aware of this as a possibility as I am aware of other incidents of this particular 'finger trouble'. The problem is that it is a normal action to pull the mixture knob at the end of every flight.
What would I do different? Move the bloody knob the right way and not be a pillock.

[SASless]

TFS,

Yes....the ROD seemed much slower after I was sat upon the ground beside the aircraft with my head between my knees trying to quit hyperventilating.

In all honesty.....I could not tell you what the ROD was....it was all basic attitude helicopter flying.....the old spot of hoped for landing on the windscreen and very interested monitoring of the rotor RPM....keeping it right at the very bottom of the green.

Airspeed pegged at the max glide airspeed....getting the seat cushion out of my mouth so I could talk on the radio....which was useless....no one around for hours. I kept looking at the spot on the windscreen and kept track of whether I was under or over shooting the spot.

Constant commentary to the passengers....who were showing some serious interest in current events for some reason. Sounded like ...cool...we're cool....yep...no problem...errrr....ahhhh....no....not cool...this ain't cool....errr...ahhh...okay...yeah...cool.....until I got a bit distracted and clammed up on them.

Finally, I decided it was all over....twern't gonna make the hole in the trees and it was going to be a tree landing....recalled something a very experienced forestry pilot had told me one time years before....bottomed the lever, gained some airspeed, and waited for the very last instant to start the flare....with the intent to build all the Nr I could....wait out the deceleration and at the last second...pick what looked best and use up all of the Nr I had.....as I went into the trees.

As I started the flare....I realized the landing spot that I had been trying to get to was on the other side of a few trees that I could get over....very hard flare...ballooned up....crossed the trees with a few feet to spare...leveled and pulled off all the Nr....landing into the pussy willow bushes soft as a baby's butt.

The real fun was walking the nine miles out to the nearest road in the dark....whistling Dixie the whole way. (Not scared of Grizzly Bears this guy...nope...not me)

[TheFlyingSquirrel]

Apolgies for plonking this one back to the top folks, but I was hoping for a real meaty post with this one.....Thanks Mr SASless for the account.

[Aesir]

Well TFS I guess it´s just not that common ; )

Me.. I have 5000 hrs, never had engine problems and don´t know anyone personally that has had an engine failure in flight.

Edited to add:

Hmmm... well scratch that, just remembered a friend of mine in Norway had an engine failure in a H-500 in 100´hover, landed pretty hard and despite a broken back he insisted that his engineer bring the tech log to him before anyone came! ´Cause he forgot to signoff for preflight that morning..

He himself wonders how strangely the mind works sometimes, despite all, he just wanted to make sure that at least he did everything right..

[overpitched]

I've only had the one. B47 3 pob, 60l of fuel, 500 agl. I was too busy trying to save my own azz to do much of a passenger brief. Got down ok, no dents or scratches. The pax were very relieved. If it had been 5 minutes earlier we would have been toast. My lucky day I guess.

[Thomas coupling]

40' hover over a sea state 5 in a Seaking. 2 torpedoes on board.
Lost an engine (No5 bearing seal blew). 4 crew, MAUM automatic hover. Disengaged hover mode headed for the waves, clipped 2 or 3 swells before realising it might fly better (or even fly at all) if we jettisoned the torpedoes!! Low and slow for what seemed an eternity with the blades revolving above me at what seemed like slow motion. Crept away to fly another day!

Engine stalled in 700' hover at night over a town in an AS355. Just the machine gun noise from the rear as P1 and P4 pressures argued with eachother! Descend and fly away very very gently, milking Nr. Landed on hospital helipad.

FPT blade detached from the back of an AS355 C250F, Symptoms looked like a runaway down. Tq's twitching, difficult to tell which engine for a while as the Nr danced with the Tq's. T4 made the decision. Shut down damaged engine. Landed on cricket green.

[What Limits]

Going backwards at 30 knots in a Gazelle at 10 feet (Tail rotor handling check). Reverse flare kept the revs up and cushioned on with remaining lever. All very calm and in slow motion.

[MOSTAFA]

Must be the first Gazelle engine failure in years or perhaps this was the early 70's.

[rotornut]

I just started my commercial course when I went up for a passenger ride in a 206 - back seat. The engine flamed out just after lift off at about 45' due to snow ingestion (machine was left outside during a blizzard and snow got into the engine cowling in spite of the snow baffles being plugged with styrofoam). Anyway yaw, sound, panel lights and I realised it was for real. We couldn't go straight down as there were lots of people standing around the airport tarmac. So the pilot pulled a bit of collective and headed for a snow drift. Bang! We hit hard but no one was hurt - just the bathtub and one skid damaged. Quite the way to learn about helicopters but I successfully finished the course.

[jellycopter]

We've gone over this ground before, try this thread:

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=156162&referrerid=34915

JJ

[ThomasTheTankEngine]

Not an engine failure but I had to do an autorotation for real (Twice)

First time in an R22 with a clucth actuator failure, Id just taken off and smelt burning and thought I had a fire so I proceded to land on a taxi way as I came to a hover I had a power loss and performed a hovering auto (The burning smell was from the oil which had driped onto the engine from the clucth actuator) Lesson learned keep an open mind to what the problem is.

Second time flying past a big radio antenna at about 1000ft the signal from the antenna rolled the governor down and the throttle to about 85%, I entered auto and the RPM recovered so I went back into powered flight and the governor rolled the throttle down again, This time I entered auto and landed. Heard some nice traditional Dutch music over the headsets this time which is a bit unusual when you have an emergency.

Now when ever flying past a radio antenna I always turn off the governor till Im a good distance away.