No, go ahead. Some people (pilots) posting on this board think that every poster on here is bon fide. It's aviation facebook mate, call out the flogs, it's also great entertainment.

​​​​​​​Spend enough time here you can sort the wheat from the chaff.

An investigation here is not required, there's some textbook flying right there. (well done Clare and Pilotgirl). Would love to know what stopped that engine though.

I have over 12,000 hours in Cherokees in this area and never had carb icing, in the Archer the air intake is under the cowling, through the air filter then alongside the engine to the carb so is pre heated, unlike some aircraft where it goes straight through the air filter at the front into the carb therefore much colder. POH says to apply it only if there is an indication of icing. Use of carb heat is not one size fits all, and even different Cherokees have different intakes and filter positions, but all preheat the air intake in some way.
I'd say carb ice was extremely unlikely, but the emergency check list says to apply it if you have an engine issue so that, as you rightly said, there is still some heat around the engine. Another kind of issue preventing fuel from getting to the carb is possible. In these aircraft if your throttle cable lets go a spring will take it to full throttle, so it wouldn't be that.

I'm more familiar with Warriors with only a few hours in Archers. The Warrior can definitely suffer carb and throttle icing which can cause rough running and also jam the throttle butterfly. I've seen a bit of carb ice, in the form of rough running, never had a failure due to it though. As for whether or not its possible in WA would just depend on the conditions of the day.

Not in all cases. It depends what caused the crash/outlanding. If you’re engine fails and you land safely on a road or paddock, the engine is not going to be covered under normal policies. You’ll be covered for recovery costs and the cost of you wings hitting the sign posts.

If you roll the aircraft into a ball, escape and lose it to fire, you may still not be covered, depending if a cause can be found. I know of an aircraft that had an engine failure and was an economical write off and they were still analysing what caused it, who was at fault and whether they would pay for it some 4 years later.

For it to take that long there must have been a scent of something amiss. I would be getting lawyers if it was taking more than a few months. We are usually not talking small amounts when aircraft are involved.

All insurance claims I have put in have usually been dealt with in a matter of days and my policy wording has no exclusions for the engine. If the engine is newly overhauled then the value of the aircraft increases and you would insure it accordingly.
I had a half life engine replaced with a freshly overhauled one and brand new prop in one instance. Win!

Very curious as to the fuel situation. Reports are that no fuel escaped from the tanks after ditching. Not sure how far they had flown but what is the range of this aircraft? The Sunday Times today states “it is reported the engine failure was due to low fuel”. Would insurance cover costs if this is the case?

If insurance only covered no fault claims they wouldn’t have to pay out often.

From listening to the interview, I got the impression that she refuelled at Geraldton - in which case she should have had heaps of fuel.
But tanks can leak, lines can break, seals can split, fuel caps can come adrift. Any of which would have to mean an insurance pay-out unless some critical component in the fuel system was not replaced when required by the maintenance schedule. And even then, the failure to replace it would need to have been a deliberate decision on the part of the operator. From all accounts the owner was quite meticulous, so that’s unlikely.
Would the fuel gauges give a warning of fuel loss? Maybe, but my recollection of typical bugsmasher fuel gauges is that they are rather vague and not to be trusted.

Have you ever had a claim where the engine throws a conrod through the crank case and a safe landing ensues and you got paid out for a new engine/pro-rata?

Is there an ADSB track floating around for this one in WA anywhere?

Reminds me of this one: https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications...ir/ao-2020-006

Clare, you are hanging on a bit tight here. Too much skin in the game. Your ‘student’ has come out publicly and said too much already, considering a possible Police or ATSB investigation.

I was always told if I was involved in an incident to say nothing to Police, Investigators or Media until I had a few days off and had a medical checkup and received legal advice.

Capt F You are absolutely right and EXACTLY what I advised the pilot when I was contacted very shortly after the incident, for the same reasons you mention. I also told pesky journalists that spent Thursday evening hassling me that I had given this advice and that I had nothing to say to any of them.

I have said here a few general things about ditching, forced landing training, insurance, Cherokee systems, how the ATSB respond to these things etc as I've probably got more insight than some, but I haven't and won't speculate here or anywhere else what caused it because I wasn't there and I don't know, though as someone who operates Archers I am obviously keen to find out.

Suffice to say I would have handled the aftermath very differently and - I'm done with all this.

The fuel gauges in my 1975 PA-28-180 are very reliable and I trust what they tell me. I also run fuel burn estimates based on tach time. The fuel gauges were much more useful when I had a large fuel leak from a failed hose on the engine side of the fuel pump.

Good for you to have picked up your fuel leak. Some pilots wouldn’t. But compound failures are not unknown - the accident books are full of them.
How often would a prudent pilot check fuel gauges? Obviously before takeoff, and hopefully at top of climb. Then every half hour or so, but the last half hour of any flight can be a bit busy, so a subtle or even major fuel leak at that stage would be easily enough missed.
I am trying not to to speculate here, rather, answering the armchair critics and non-expert journalists all too ready to imply that fuel mismanagement was the cause, when so far there has been no full investigation. IF fuel is a suspect, an immediate audit of the last two refuelling facilities should be done to check fuel quality and uplifts against dispenser meter accuracy. Unfortunately this probably won’t happen. The integrity of the fuel gauges would be hard to determine after such a dunking in salt water.

As to this obsession for postulating the cause of the engine failure, a gambling person would put money on pilot error nevertheless, there always exists the real possibility that it was a hard failure of sorts. Wise to keep an open mind until one cause or the other has been eliminated.

Either way, does it really matter right now? If it was the former, the pilot will have learned a valuable lesson and will now be a far wiser and safer pilot. If it was a hardware failure, dismantling of the engine will hopefully reveal it’s cause. As we all know, things do break at inopportune times.


Text book ditching …. Tick
Not being eaten by a shark… Extra Big tick (Especially with WA being the shark capital of the world)

All in all, a really good outcome.

In the hope of learning something useful I had a look around for similar incidents relating to the Archer II, and then the wider PA-28 range. I was particularly interested in fuel issues, given my earlier thoughts expressed above.

In terms of common failures these as these are usually (eventually) addressed via an AD that database was worth a check. For the PA-28-* there have been a number of AD's around the fuel or fuel delivery system. It's possible one or more may have covered this particular machine, but information suggests all applicable AD's had been carried out, and there doesn't appear to be anything recent that was likely to be relevant.

However when I first read of this, and listened to the describe failure mode, I was reminded of an incident in my flying past, when I came across a leaking fuel drain. As I recall this was one of the wing drains, and fuel was dripping at a fair rate. Subsequent investigation determined that valve was a little 'sticky' and had probably remained partially 'up' after someone had carried out a fuel check.

To some extent such a possibility is reflected in the AD's, and via this incident, however this relates to lockable fuel drains and presumably is not at issue with this aircraft. That said, while I don't recall the date of my experience, I am fairly sure the valve wasn't locked up per se.

Compounding this I also well recollect fuel gauges in some of these old machines that were always a bit suspect, so one tended not to rely on them. Of course what this means is that if you knew you'd uplifted sufficient fuel for a flight, yet the gauges were indicating something different, that information may be erroneously discounted - which could be a problem if you lost sufficient fuel en route.

Now I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not suggesting this was necessarily the issue here, there remain a myriad of possible causes (for example, loose unions, blockages [sealant?] etc). However I relay this because it's something that happened to me and others, and given the possible outcome I figure it worth mentioning/reminding the value of a last visual inspection of the drains before climbing into the machine.

EXDAC, aside from this I see there were some AD's that were possibly relevant to the fuel selector in your 180, but not the 181.

FP.

Fuel leaks (and often unreliable steam driven fuel gauges) on bugsmashers are why there’s a recommended practice of dipping tanks after a flight to confirm that the amount of fuel consumed is the amount expected to have been consumed. Either that, or achieve the same outcome by making sure you compare the amount of fuel uploaded with the expected amount to have been consumed.

Justva point on fuel slicks. There would definitely have been a slick of both oil and fuel in the accident area. So reports of nothing are ridiculous. These engines are oily and unusable fuel would be still around. The fuel tanks did not rupture so fuel spillage would be slow in anycase.