Engine Failure
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"But seriously there is a case for not writing under one's own name. Google is everywhere these days, and uses very clever methods to identify what is a person's name, and to link it to various sites. And any smart prospective employer will google on your name, and if he finds you are posting anti-business left wing views everywhere then you won't get the job."
Yeah but for all you know Dave Wilson might be my 'real' name for internet fora purposes.........
Yeah but for all you know Dave Wilson might be my 'real' name for internet fora purposes.........
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although the pay is exceptional for those few positions
I wonder if they had Customs and Avgas there. If they didn't have Customs, or if he didn't comply with the PNR requirements, it's no wonder he got fired at.
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But seriously there is a case for not writing under one's own name.
Someone came up with the answer within minutes.
So one way you could reverse the process would be to find that conversation
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Engine failures: none so far (knock on wood)
Flying during 36 years, 1500 hours of which : (roughly)
(a) 150 hours in club rentals (simple training/touring aircraft)
(b) 450 hours in private rentals (mostly complex aircraft, some historic)
(c) 900 hours in own private aircraft.
In general the private rentals were flown with better engine management skills so their engines would be less abused.
Mostly Lycoming engines (O320/O360, IO360, IO540), some Continentals, 100hp RRs. About 50h with Gipsy Majors.
It would be interesting to hear from people who do thousands of hours on club rentals (instructorsw maybe?) whether power/mixture abuse actually makes for more engine failures in their experience. Does the greater utilization and more frequent maintenance checks of the club rentals offset the abuse, or not?
Would that be this one? Pink aeroplane car | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
(a) 150 hours in club rentals (simple training/touring aircraft)
(b) 450 hours in private rentals (mostly complex aircraft, some historic)
(c) 900 hours in own private aircraft.
In general the private rentals were flown with better engine management skills so their engines would be less abused.
Mostly Lycoming engines (O320/O360, IO360, IO540), some Continentals, 100hp RRs. About 50h with Gipsy Majors.
It would be interesting to hear from people who do thousands of hours on club rentals (instructorsw maybe?) whether power/mixture abuse actually makes for more engine failures in their experience. Does the greater utilization and more frequent maintenance checks of the club rentals offset the abuse, or not?
Watch out for my pink aeroplane.
Maybe we should start another thread but I think is is relevant to find out peoples experience with engine failures in GA aircraft.
To develop a real picture it would be nice to know:
Total GA hours and over how many years
# Failures or suspect performance to cause a diversion
Reasons if known
Warning signs if any
Status of the plane = rental, owner operated, charter
Outcome and lessons learned?
Personally I've about 1200 hours in 9 years, 80 percent of behind an IO-540 I own with never a peep of trouble. The rest in various rentals/trainers
20driver
To develop a real picture it would be nice to know:
Total GA hours and over how many years
# Failures or suspect performance to cause a diversion
Reasons if known
Warning signs if any
Status of the plane = rental, owner operated, charter
Outcome and lessons learned?
Personally I've about 1200 hours in 9 years, 80 percent of behind an IO-540 I own with never a peep of trouble. The rest in various rentals/trainers
20driver
I have had 3 engine failures in piston GA type aircraft (over about 2700 hrs and 25 + yrs of flying these types of aircraft)
1) C 150(flight school dual training trip): We were climbing out on a flight to the practice area when I noticed the oil pressure was a solid needle width below the white line in the middle of the green arc of that horrible cessna no numbers oil pressure guage fitted to all light cessna singles. This was significant because on every other flight in this airplane the I had observed the oil pressure guage sitting exactly on the white line. I told the student to turn back to the airport. In the 3 minutes or so it took to get back to the runway the oil pressure slowly dropped to zero but by that time we were on short final, so I shut everything down and we made an uneverntfull landing. It turned out the oil pump drive had failed. I got a very valuable piece of advice from an old timer early in my flying career. He said he never wanted me to say an engine guage was " in the green" he wanted me to give the instrument value because the tend in the guage was a very important indicator of impending trouble. In this case it saved me from a certain of off airfield landing as if I had waited untill the oil pressure dropped to below the green arc I never would have made it back to the airport.
2) PA31 Navajo (commercial charter flight): Turbocharger and wastegate failure. The aircraft suffered a catastrophic turbo failure which also caused the waste gate to fail in the fully closed position on a shuttle climb (due to nearby high terrain) from a small airport. The engine did not stop, but would not generate useable thrust. The choice was 100 miles over the rocks single engine, or a single engine NDB circle to land to minimums. The FO and I discussed the options and chose the landing which worked out fine. As it turned out 2 other pilots had added a total of 6 litres of oil to that engine in the previous 4 hrs . They did not think this fact was worth reporting to maintainance This failure was 100% preventable as the engine gave fair warning but the previous pilots were too stupid to notice.
3) Twin Commanche(privately owned and operated): Just as I had gotten established on the GS on an ILS approach the left engine ran down. Since the aircraft was stable on the approach I just feathered the engine rather then trying to figure out why it had failed, and continued the approach to an uneventfull landing. After landing it turned out the left main fuel tank as dry. When I had taken off the mains were at 1/4 and the aux tanks were full. As soon as I leveled off I switched to the aux tanks and remembered that the fuel selector felt "odd" . When I did my descent checks at the destination and swiched back to the mains and was surprised that the left aux fuel guage stilled showed full but ignored it because the left main stilled showed 1/4. It turned out the selector mechanism cabling had failed and the left side never switched to the aux tank. The engine stopped when the tank ran dry, although the gauge stilled showed the same 1/4 full as it had indicated at takeoff. In retrospect there were signs something was wrong yet I did not clue in. There was plenty of fuel on the right side so I could have kept the engine running with crossfeed. Again a preventable engine failure with pre failure warning signs
Last edited by Big Pistons Forever; 10th Aug 2010 at 15:43.
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BPF -- OK, I didn't mention my engine failure due to fuel starvation. That had been more pilot error than engine failure 
.
We also sometimes run a tip tank dry. The engine doesn't exactly fail then, doesn't it?
.We also sometimes run a tip tank dry. The engine doesn't exactly fail then, doesn't it?
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'Good luck with that budget ;-)'
Dunno, 1/4 share would give me a 24K glider, probably get into something pretty decent for that. I don't mean a Nimby 4 or Ash 26 obviously.
Dunno, 1/4 share would give me a 24K glider, probably get into something pretty decent for that. I don't mean a Nimby 4 or Ash 26 obviously.
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1/4 share would give me a 24K glider
If you do manage to stretch to an Ash26, though, bring it up to Portmoak some day and show it off
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Ah sorry, didn't understand your banter. Actually the local service club here in Lincoln do training for £100 an hour in a 152 so 6K seems pretty reasonable for PPL and rest of stuff. Maybe if you did it in min hours (do you still get credits for silver C? Can't remember now) there might even be a night rating in there as well. I'm ex avionics engineer so not exactly a stranger to the fanned glider. At least I should be good at power off landings.........(why do they call them forced landings, it's just a landing 
)
Orf to Orstralia in a minute on the quite wondrous A380 so I'll be off here for a couple of months.
)Orf to Orstralia in a minute on the quite wondrous A380 so I'll be off here for a couple of months.
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Well I said I was always in failure escape mode and today the old Beaver suddenly dropped from 2200rpm after toff to 1900rpm and I noticed it at max gross. Climbed straight ahead along the river just in case the floats needed to get wet suddenly and made sure I had plenty of room between me and the ground before making my turn over land.
It certainly can happen at any time but I fly expecting it so like today, no great shock. Meant a landing and cowls off to sort out the problem which turned out to be quite minor. But bobbing around in the sea trying to remove cowls etc is not fun!
It certainly can happen at any time but I fly expecting it so like today, no great shock. Meant a landing and cowls off to sort out the problem which turned out to be quite minor. But bobbing around in the sea trying to remove cowls etc is not fun!
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HI Douglas, just found that they have free internet at Changi airport...waiting for the connection to Brisbane at the moment. A380 top deck is the place to be, lot quieter than downstairs, although downstairs is pretty quiet too. Uncannily quiet at take off, bit eery really, you tend to associate take off with roaring noises but not so the 380. Very nice inside, SIA entertainment system is top class, just watched Iron Man II and Kickass on the way out. (You can judge my cultural level for yourself 
). However I did have a nap listening to Chopin which kind of balances it out. Anyway, fly safe, I'm off to get the A330 to Bris now.
). However I did have a nap listening to Chopin which kind of balances it out. Anyway, fly safe, I'm off to get the A330 to Bris now.
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I thought this thread was about engine failures?
There may be another factor that may contribute to engine problems: the use of Mogas. Has the rising cost of Avgas and increased Mogas usage affected the engine failure rate?
There may be another factor that may contribute to engine problems: the use of Mogas. Has the rising cost of Avgas and increased Mogas usage affected the engine failure rate?
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It may be so but only a tiny fraction of "normal" GA uses mogas. The vast majority of airports do not even sell mogas.
The use of mogas would correlate strongly with the use of non-certified engines, which in turn will make any comparisons meaningless.
Once you get away from the certified engine scene, there is a huge variation in engine reliability.
The use of mogas would correlate strongly with the use of non-certified engines, which in turn will make any comparisons meaningless.
Once you get away from the certified engine scene, there is a huge variation in engine reliability.
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I spoke to two guys I know with thousands of GA SEP hours. One, with 3,000 hours, has never had an engine failure (and he's an instructor, ref previous comments about the reliability of flying school rentals) and the other with 6,000 hours (private flying) has had one engine failure. The latter also commented that engines rarely just stop, there is usually a warning that all is not well (gauges, strange noises etc). And hopefully the pilot is paying attention and spots the warning signs before the thing goes bang...
Is it really a big deal then
Apart from those dodging small arms fire and navigating burning canyons there seems to be few pilots with direct involvement with engine failures in a GA setting.
Those posted, which were helpful thank you, fuel management is a key issue and knowing your engines regular performance is another.
That pretty much mirrors the NTSB information I've read.
Still wondering in the case of the OP what they cause was. A search of the NTSB database did not reveal any reports which surprised me.
20driver
Those posted, which were helpful thank you, fuel management is a key issue and knowing your engines regular performance is another.
That pretty much mirrors the NTSB information I've read.
Still wondering in the case of the OP what they cause was. A search of the NTSB database did not reveal any reports which surprised me.
20driver
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Hanging around in the vicinity of some maintenance shops, the only catastrophically failed engines I have seen personally were on twins.
All were old engines - not that I believe this means a huge amount in itself, because one of them, with a broken conrod sticking out of the crankcase, had come out of a (UK) overhaul shop hours earlier.
Fuel exhaustion / mismanagement incidents are far more common.
All were old engines - not that I believe this means a huge amount in itself, because one of them, with a broken conrod sticking out of the crankcase, had come out of a (UK) overhaul shop hours earlier.
Fuel exhaustion / mismanagement incidents are far more common.
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Apart from those dodging small arms fire and navigating burning canyons there seems to be few pilots with direct involvement with engine failures in a GA setting.
I know two GA pilots who had power failures and crashes with AAIB reports. Although pilot error was not the cause in either case, neither brings it up in conversation, (I first learned from spouses), and I doubt they posted about it on pprune.
FWIW both (helicopters) had a recently maintained drive part fail, not the actual engine.