What happens in an actual FL?

[Prop swinger]

Originally Posted by peter337

Why not use the mixture lever?

Rotax, ie no mixture lever?

[hum]

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Reading the original post again I think I may have missed the actual question and gone for the war stories a bit soon...

I'm curious to know what it's actually like though..

I think this very much depends on the circumstances..

Time critical stuff that require immediate action is OK, the human mind is actually well equipped to deal with traumatic situations. A short sharp burst of adrenaline can be a good thing, speeding up thought processes, heightening awareness suppressing fear etc, but it can also deceive... temporal distortion is an interesting research area of human psychology to pilots..

http://peterhancock.cos.ucf.edu/wp-c...tress_2005.pdf

Of course 'coming down' from an adrenaline-fuelled incident can be more traumatic that the incident itself.. nicely summed up by Ghengis earlier:

.. Half an hour later I pulled myself together again, drove home very slowly, then got quietly p****d. Next day I was fine.

On the other hand, that horrible feeling that comes when the realisation sets in that a series of errors or bad decisions have led to a powered aircraft turning into a glider is no fun at all... The danger here is self-inducing a stress level beyond where best performance is.. more great jellyhead stuff for pilots..

Yerkes

The trick is to prioritise correctly, worry about blame, consequences, insurance, egg-on-face etc later.. fly the plane, fly the plane fly the plane..

[Big Pistons Forever]

Originally Posted by hum

On the other hand, that horrible feeling that comes when the realisation sets in that a series of errors or bad decisions have led to a powered aircraft turning into a glider is no fun at all...

I think this is another very important point not addressed in training.

You will screw up.

For example inattention which caused you to miss that growing headwind or maybe a bit of wishful thinking on how much gas you have left and the flight that started out fine is now going pear shaped

Don't say it won't happen to you because it eventually happens to everyone.
The temptation to push on will be strong but this is where the men are separated from the boys. Realizing that you are deliberately giving up safety margins and then doing something about it is the mark of the good pilots. Easier said then done of course but wholly within the control of the pilot.........

[Pace]

With advanced GPS and displays it should be possible for the avionics manufacturer to build in a Forced Landing mode!
Hit the forced landing mode button
And have a guidance display with a continually updated landing spot displayed.
As companies like Cirrus seem to
Be into gadgets could this be a useful one to have ?
But one minute Cirrus already have a forced landing handle in the roof ?

Pace

[The500man]

Pace, I think the VP-400 is what you're describing there.

[Pace]

Amazing piece of kit if its as good as they claim At this rate we will not even have to be pilots to be motored around the skies

Pace

[DeltaV]

With advanced GPS and displays it should be possible for the avionics manufacturer to build in a Forced Landing mode! Hit the forced landing mode button and have a guidance display with a continually updated landing spot displayed.

The engine quits and you want to reach for the GPS? Good luck! For the sake of your family I hope you have good life insurance.

[Andy H]

DeltaV makes a very good point. Don't muck about when the fan stops - put the nose down and look for a field - quickly!

My three "real" FLs were due to frozen controls, runing out of fuel and the prop falling off. In each case I landed OK because I concentrated, I aviataed and I ignored everything else.

The real problem though is the owner of the field you come down in. I've been lucky, only one was a b*****d. He sent in the heavy gang and I had to do a runner. The other two were real gentlemen

Andy

[Pace]

DeltaV

I know what I would do but as so many Cirrus drivers appear to want to pull the chute believing they stand a better chance than a forced landing maybe such a device could improve their odds of a successful landing!
We had a long thread about how incurrent many PPLs are with forced landings and how into gadgets the current pilots are that such a device may help : )

Pace

[DeltaV]

But this isn't the Cirrus chute-pull thread. There are more people flying around in aircraft that aren't a Cirrus than people who are and very probably more people flying around in aircraft with no red handle in the roof liner than those with. For most, then, an engine quitting is going to result in a forced landing flown to the ground, which is what the OP posted about, and unless it's flown there by the pilot in charge the outcome is not going to be great.
By all means use the GPS when you're down and parked to tell your friends where to find you.

[foxmoth]

a quick "cause" check would have restored power. Instead he was so fixated on flying the forced approach procedure like his instructor taught him he never made any attempt to find out why the engine failed.

If that is what his instructor taught him then I am surprised, most would teach that once you have set the aircraft up initially you then do a cause of failure check (though this can be omitted if there has been a big bang and bits of engine flying off!)for exactly this reason. I will say though, that when checking PPLs out a lot of them will not do these checks, nor a Mayday call or crash checks.

[Sir Niall Dementia]

The first one I got away with more by luck than judgement, a cylinder gave up on a PA28 on climb out and I landed on the cross runway, engine quit completely at 250'

Then came the BIGGIE, with an uncontained turbine burst taking out lots of systems including hydraulics, a couple of control runs and a few other bits as well as setting off the second engine fire warning and starting a hydraulic oil fire (this was a rotary twin) It all went wrong at 400' on the approach and I managed to do what Bob Hoover advised and "flew it as far as possible into the crash" When I listened to the CVR I was surprised at how calm the P2 and I sounded, it was almost like the simulator, but I realised we had forgotten something, I told the AAIB man and he said that everyone misses something when it all goes wrong, and that in our case it wouldn't have made the slightest difference. This was when CVRs stopped on first impact (now they run for 45 seconds or so after the G switch operates) we had 17.5 seconds from first loud bang to CVR stopping, but still managed a lot of the memory drills.

One thing worth looking at is the frequency of engine failures at high power (take off, climb etc) compared to in the cruise or during normal power reduction. I don't have the figures available, but I believe the rate of failure at high power is approx 3-1 the rate of failure in the cruise.

As for running out of fuel as a cause, maybe we should all take advice from Vince of Dundee golf course fame.

SND

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Partial engine failure, with an instructor on board, who immediately took control at which point I was essentially a passenger (along with my family in the back).

The instructor did it by the book, as I had been trained:

(1) set up for glide

(2) decide where to go (in this case a lake round the other side of the mountain that I didn't even know was there)

(3) as there was now plenty of time to faff around (we had about 9,000' to go) he worked methodically across the controls and instruments ...

... and found and fixed the problem.

Sort-of reassuring that what you've been trained to do does actually work ... provided that, like this guy, you don't panic.

[Doodlebug]

Hello Mr Paul. I had an actual failure when I had around 150 hours total time, powered, so here's my tuppence-worth. At the time I'd reached 'Silver C' level in gliding. The aircraft was a Piper Super Cub and I had a glider on tow at the time. It's been a little while (just had a think, touching 20 years ago, actually ) but I think I can answer you relatively accurately:

''What happened when the donkey gave out? Did you react almost immediately? Did it take a while to sink in?''
The airspeed decreased very rapidly, no doubt the additional drag of the tow-rope and glider didn't exactly help. Stuffed the stick forward and yes, that part was pretty much instinctual. I knew pretty much immediately that the engine had passed away, yes.

''Did you trim out and then go through the restart? What did you think when the restart was unsuccessful ?''
Didn't even think of trimming out. Never crossed my mind. I remember frantically rocking to signal the glider to release, because in the surge of adrenaline I'd clean forgotten his registration and therefore didn't use the radio. A glance into the mirror showed him long gone - he'd released instantly when he saw his ride nosing over, clever man. Didn't do any restart procedures. I was low and over a quarry, therefore prioritizing sorting out my landing, which was obviously very imminent . (utilising perfect 20/20 hindsight, I just might have recovered partial power for some time had I experimented with the mixture, seeing as the post-mortem discovered sand and dirt in the needle-and-seat, the aircraft being refuelled in the field from drums. But who knows?)

''Did you then select the field and approach? Was it thought or was it all automatic? Did the aircraft fly the same as it would with power idle and trimmed out? Any noticeable differences?''
The glider pilots in that club tended to want to go to a nearby quarry when the sun was low, and I had always regarded either the golf-course or the highway, both next to the quarry, as my emergency strips. The approach was almost pre-determined as I was circling at the time of the failure and the combination of strong wind, low sun and the direction of turn dictated parking the thing in a particular direction, on the golf course, so not much thought required to flesh out the base to final. I kept the tow-rope attached because it tends to shorten your landing-run, so yes, the aircraft flew the same as when I'd come in to land after a routine tow. No noticeable differences, other than the two elderly gentlemen on the green ahead of me who normally aren't on the runway during approach. Anyway, the old chaps made it out of the way and I made it down (and into the local rag!) without hurting the machine, much to the delight of the gliding-club.

I think that that one worked out primarily because of my gliding background, the drag of the tow-rope slowing me down, the grass surface and the strong headwind. More luck than anything else.

[Big Pistons Forever]

Originally Posted by foxmoth

If that is what his instructor taught him then I am surprised, most would teach that once you have set the aircraft up initially you then do a cause of failure check (though this can be omitted if there has been a big bang and bits of engine flying off!)for exactly this reason. I will say though, that when checking PPLs out a lot of them will not do these checks, nor a Mayday call or crash checks.

I think the fact that the C 172 pilot forgot to do the cause check is reflection of the fact that when the forced approach is taught the student "knows" the restart is not going to be successful because the exercise is always presented as practice flying the forced approach profile. So the student mindlessly rattles off the checks at warp speed 7 and then gets down to the business of trying to make the field. By not emphasizing the importance of the checks I think under pressure a low time PPL is going to revert to what he/she practiced most, which was the purely flying part of the exercise.

Personally if the student doesn't get an effective methodical set of cause checks with him touching each control as he calls them out early in the PFL then I terminate the exercise at that point and we climb back up and go find another field and try again. The best way to deal with an engine failure is to get the engine going again, with the obvious caveat that there has to be sufficient time and space to execute the cause check and the cause check is only carried out after the gliding attitude is established and the aircraft is pointing at a landable surface. But the bottom line from my POV is that an effective cause check is as important as the skill to fly the actual forced landing pattern and training should reflect that

BTW A great exercise is fail the engine and then when the student gets to the fuel part of the cause check and says he had switched tanks, push the throttle back in and say OK power restored, now what are you going to do .

[The500man]

Cause of failure check? Is anyone actually taught this? From the instructors I've flown with it's always been a case of going through a memory check list, which doesn't involve looking at gauges like fuel quantity/ flow, oil temp/ pressure, CHT/ EGT etc. The typical check list is fuel on, mixture rich, master on, ignition both or start to turn the prop. If it doesn't start shut it down. I thought the point of the restart check list was that if you do all of those things and it doesn't restart than what happens next is the same as if you had looked for the cause and discovered the reason?

[foxmoth]

the typical check list is fuel on, mixture rich, master on, ignition both or start to turn the prop. If it doesn't start shut it down.

Unless you were doing aeros (in which case you will be looking to do this, but already know the cause of failure) the prop will almost certainly still be rotating unless it was a mechanical fault, so it is the cause checks that will sort out something like fuel starvation (changing tanks and fuel pump on) or faulty mag (which is why you should try them independently). Checking gauges I would agree not so important, though a quick glance at them might save a bit of time, the important thing is that you cover all the items that might get the engine going again and your list missed at least two of these for most aircraft!

[Gertrude the Wombat]

The typical check list is fuel on, mixture rich, master on, ignition both or start to turn the prop.

Plus primer knob not hanging out ...

[The500man]

You guys are just nit picking! It's up to you to know what fuel systems you have on your baby (alternate tank, boost pump, manual primer, shut-off valve etc.) and since it is aircraft specific I thought "fuel on" was sufficient to cover it.

Foxmoth, I didn't think a faulty magneto would stop the engine unless you were running solely on the one that failed. Wouldn't you just have rough running (too rich) and an RPM drop?

[Big Pistons Forever]

Originally Posted by The500man

.

Foxmoth, I didn't think a faulty magneto would stop the engine unless you were running solely on the one that failed. Wouldn't you just have rough running (too rich) and an RPM drop?

I had a mag fail in flight. The mag cam broke and the effect was to massively advance the spark on one set of pugs. The engine did not like the dueling spark plugs very much and ran very rough at a much reduced power output. Simply switching off the bad mag restored near normal power and allowed an uneventful landing. In this case the "nitpicking" of checking the mags probably saved me an off airport landing..........

I would also suggest that the first thing you do if the engine fails is get the carb heat out because if the engine failed due to carb icing the only heat left will be the residual heat in the exhaust pipe which will only provided usable hot air for a few seconds after engine combustion stops.