Better to never leave the UK mainland then.

What was the diagnosis? If it was the engine driven fuel pump, how many hours did it fail at?

IO540: Not sure how many the hours the engine pump specifcally has, the engine only has 520 hours since last overhaul - but is running on condition due calendar time. Interestingly, I double checked the POH which states fuel pump on for "Descent" so have amended my checks accordingly of course, but it shouldn't cut at idle with pump off. Only a matter of time before someone forgets the pump and powers down to idle on finals....

Absolutely no problems at any other power setting, it's a IO360-D with CSU prop by the way.

Engineers suspected fouled plugs and nozzles...so had them cleaned, but problem remains, although not as easy to reproduce on the ground as before.

What problem remains? The engine quitting on you?

Have you looked in the log book to see if the engine driven fuel pump was replaced overhauled when the engine was overhauled. When was the electric pump overhauled? It will all be in the engine log book.

Why do you continue to fly an aircraft with a known problem?

I am not trying to be awkward, but this was my very point earlier, if you ask for trouble you bet you will find it.

FWIW I would no more test an aircraft's pressurisation at night over hostile terrain than I would continue to fly an aircraft with a known problem that could result in the engine quitting. The reason you have an electric pump is so, when the mechanical pump quits, you have a backup. If you know or suspect the mechanical pump could be faulty you have just defeated the intention of the designer in specifying a backup electric pump.

It flies

Please save us. I dont think you will get anything either new or which could not be found from doing a little research on Google. :)

If the engine driven fuel pump is not 100% then you could be looking at a big problem. It will be either a diaphragm pump or a gear pump, and a suspected fault in either of those is an immediate grounding and a stripdown of the pump. Plus a check of the oil filter etc for bits of metal.

Fuji: Calm down :) I found your post almost bit accusatory to be honest! I'm not some dodgy flyboy wideboy flying a dodgy plane around looking for trouble! I have two young kids for starters!

Lets not turn this into a slanging match, did I say I was flying the aircraft around knowing the engine pump (if it is that) was not 100%?

I would very much welcome any advice you and IO have to offer, seriously...perhaps if I PM you all the details? I'm interfacing with two AMOs to get the bottom of the problem, but its a tightrope between rational problem identification and repair and being ripped off chasing expensive geese. As I'm sure you both have experience of!

XX621

Sorry, I didnt mean to imply you were and was generally concerned that you said the problem was not so easy to reproduce on the ground from which I (perhaps wrongly) assumed you had reproduced the problem in the air.

You are welcome to PM me and I will offer any help I can with pleasure.

So lets just be clear. You flight tested a 421 at night over remote terrain after an annual inspection knowing there had been problems with the pressurisation system and, at the same time, intended to give instructional training to a pilot who had never flown the aircraft before at night and during a flight test. I would very much like to see that NTSB report - perhaps you would like to provide the link?

As I said before look for trouble, and sure as hell you will find it - and you did :). I dont need 100,000 or even 500 hours to arrive at that conclusion.

As to your repeated references to your own vast experience you may well wish to review the Tenerife KLM accident and take care to make sure your experience has not made you infallible.

Anyway rather than beat about the bush you have probably guessed I think you are a troll, and if you are not, well, I think you look for trouble, so dont worry I will not be flying with you any time soon. :}

I have genuinely enjoyed the stories however, and I shall look forward to some more, please keep them coming.

I am 50/50 on whether Guppy is a very experienced FSX pilot, or a real pilot. If you read pprune for enough years, you will be able to deliver all the right stories. My main PPL instructor was a brilliant story teller, but I did eventually suss that he was a total fake (fake ATPL, fake IR, fake type ratings in a TBM and a PC12, fake TBM TRI/TRE, countless fake trips across the world in PA46s, etc). He eventually (and suddenly) vanished, following some "happenings" at the school where he was a CFI. He was a real CFI though - but a UK "CFI" is a fake qualification anyway; a one man band running a school out of a shed is automatically a "CFI" of that school.

But he was a good instructor. The best instructor I ever had (at the PPL level). He taught me what the trim wheel does (it sets the speed; all the engine does is control the rate of climb - how many pilots actually know that?) and that watching the speedo on final is going to dramatically improve one's life expectancy. I just had to quietly smile when he said that if too many planes tune into a VOR (yes I don't mean a DME) it stops working.

Guppy is quite possibly real, but I think his vast range of exploits has gone to his head. He would more effectively pass on his wisdom if he was less patronising. The way he is going he should expect a job offer from the CAA any time soon. As a consolation prize he could have a retirement job editing GASIL/GASCO ;)

XX621 - feel free to email me if you want to pass anything by me. I don't know the IO360 but I might give you some ideas, or ask around people who might know. Having done the rounds of engine stuff a bit, in the UK, I now think there is precious sod all engine debugging expertise over here. I was once ripped off 1400 euros (AOG) for a replacement starter motor (listed at US$400 but that's a side issue) but the company, JAR145 et cetc etc with EASA Design Authority etc etc etc did not know enough to determine it was a duff battery. Now, I carry a voltmeter in my toolbox ;) A friend with a turbo engine spent ~6 months messing around with everybody and their dog trying to find out what was wrong with the waste gate controller; I think it was by luck that it was finally fixed.

But if I had an unexplained stoppage, apparently cured by the electric pump, I would not fly until the whole fuel system is stripped and inspected, and I mean all the pipes, and tanks. After all, they still haven't actually found what did in BA038 :)

If you have the EDM700 data, does it show the stoppage, as a loss of EGTs? Once, in the descent into Antwerp, ~ 8000ft, heavily leaned, I had a "hesitation" for a few secs showing itself as a sudden loss of IAS; I went to max power and it went away. The EGTs always looked fine. Upon landing, my friend and I took the cowlings off and checked everything visually, check for fuel leaks (with the pump running), etc. Found nothing. Did extra long power checks, took off and climbed at Vx into strong headwind, but it never happened again. The EDM data showed nothing! Certainly no interruption of combustion (unless it was only seconds). I now think it may have been a brief downdraught and with the autopilot holding a constant -VS, given the very low power setting that would have done it. So I think it was my imagination but it was a little worrying at the time.

Fuji/IO540 - thanks very much. I will PM you both giving full details. I could use a second opinion on things.

Mr Guppy - still waiting for the NTSB report URL.

Hmm so lets see no NTSB report of what after all amounts to a very serious failure, no incident report to enable others to be aware of the problem, no AD to give ntoice to other engineers that the aircraft could have a serious issue. Infact it would seem nothing to avert perhaps another crew killing themselves and their passengers when suffering the same failure at FL285. Notwithstanding the FAA saw fit to review the incident and commend the crew.

It is a great story however.

As it happens the bits I've read about, (through another forum), make very good reading.

Yeah, right, a big piece comes off a 421 (a little homebuilt machine operated under the Experimantal regime, never used for anything of relevance like paying passenger carriage; not even approved for IFR) sucking off a piece of the instrument panel with it, and no SB, no AD... nuffink.

Makes one look up in awe at the wonder boys (and girls, too) inside our very own EASA, who rightly regard the FAA, and all those who fly under it (myself included) as a load of cowboys.

Quite right too (spoken with the correct RAF public school accent).

I am off to log my flight of this morning - a 3.5 minute taxi to the pumps and a 3.5 minute taxi back to parking. It was for the purpose of a flight, so I can log it (the flight was cancelled due to cloud at 2000ft). I need to log everything I can get my hands on. One day I might even make 5 figures and then I might feature in one of Mr Guppy's postings.

That all depends on whether it were a Civil aircraft or Public aircraft. If it were civil, of course it would be reportable. If Public (i.e. us government) then depending on certain conditions, it wouldn't be reportable.

Not knowing who operated the aeroplane, we can't possibly tell if it was reportable.

Flying is all about managing risks. Obviously there is a risk that the engine in a single engine aircraft could suddenly stop, but there are also many other risks during a typical flight. The secret is of course to reduce the risks as far as practicable. To do this one must first understand both the probability of an adverse occurance and its consequence. IMO ab initio flight training does not do a very good job in this area. It assigns a far higher probability to the engine failure scenario than is warrented , but more critically allmost all the training has to do with actions after the engine failures. If you examine the actual engine failure statistics you will find that over 80% of the light aircraft engine failures were directly caused by the actions or inactions of the pilot.

The least likely event is having a engine which had a normal run up
is showing normal engines guage indications, has sufficent uncontaminated fuel supply from a a properly selected tank, and is not showing signs of carb ice ...... just suddenly stop. Or even more simply if you want to greatly reduced the risk of engine failure do a few sinple things on every flight

Before flying

1) make sure there is no water in the fuel

2) do not take off if the runup is abnormal

and, In flight

1) plan every flight with at least an hour of fuel in reserve using book fuel flows plus 10 %

2) monitor your engine instruments regularly thoughout the flight and be especially vigilent for the signs that carb ice is forming.

If you do these things and are flying one of the simpler trainers or tourers the chance you will experience an engine failure in your PPL flying lifetime is effectively zero.

If you are going to have a non fatal accident it will most likely be a loss of control on takeoff or landing caused by skills fade, and if you are going to have a fatal accident it will probably be due to flying in poor weather.

So looking at it from a purely statistical approach it would seem the best way to reduce the risk of you having an accident is to regularly practice takeoff and landings to maintain your aircraft control skills and not to push the weather. While you do not want to ignore the possibility of an engine failure especially the most dangerous scenario, an engine failure right after takeoff, you also IMO should not ascribe more importance to this particualar emergency than it warrents.

Getting more and more vague, one notices...

Very good.

Ah ok, I see....I just would have thought that something like a large hole and bits dangling out of the aeroplane would have been of interest to the NTSB in case it happened to some other poor bugger.

The problem with posting NTSB or whatever reports is that they contain the tail number, which one can look up on the FAA database (not to mention google) and one thing leads to another.... all very undesirable ;)

You are only required to report the following under NTSB 830 for aircraft under 12,500lbs:

1) Flight control system malfunction or failure; (2) Inability of any required flight crewmember to perform normal flight duties as a result of injury or illness; (3) Failure of structural components of a turbine engine excluding compressor and turbine blades and vanes; (4) In-flight fire; or (5) Aircraft collide in flight; (6) Damage to property, other than the aircraft, estimated to exceed $25,000 for repair (including materials and labor) or fair market value in the event of total loss, whichever is less.

Apologies for referring so far back (this thread has been growing fast), but here's a question I was pondering the other day while reading "The Killing Zone"... Presumably not every engine failure leads to an accident, as I assume all that PFL training I've done (and I like to practice it every so often, even now that I'm licensed to kill myself :)) gives me half a chance of actually landing the plane without damage.

So I'm guessing that actual incidences of engine failure are quite a bit higher than that... anybody care to guess how frequent?

Interesting Thread
 

SN_3 Guppy - Looking at the NTSB form 830

2. Substantial Damage - means damage or failure which adversely affects the structural strength, performance or flight characteristics of the aircraft, and which would normally require major repair or replacement of the affected component

Your incident certainly involves substantial damage. I find it very hard to believe the FAA would not have consider this to be the case. Performance and flight characteristics were adversely affected by your own account. The damage would be a major repair. Enough to write the plane off I suspect.

Something does not pass the smell check here.


IO-540's has written a lot if stuff that is incredibly useful to anyone who wants to use GA for a practical purposes. I'm guessing that includes a lot of people in this forum

Good practical advice from Big Pistons. I have looked through NTSB reports for years and almost every report involving engine issues was caused by fuel mis management or flying a plane that belonged on the ground. Anyone who takes a plane out from MX and heads in IMC or night is playing the odds. I love the ones that include lines like "unidentified liquid stains noted on the ground under the plane that had not flown for X months"

Single engine - if you fail on takeoff get the nose over very fast and take what comes straight ahead. The odds are trying to maneuver is a going to make it worse. If you have altitude flying the airplane all the way down means you are likely to walk away. Energy is a function of velocity squared, so controlling the speed is what counts. Trying to finesse a crash, I guess if you have enough practice it makes sense.

There are a lot of things that might happen to you flying GA. Operating a well maintained plane with some reasonable caution on fuel means engine failure is far down your list of potential problems.

Back to the OP - what was the cause of the failure?

20 driver

Also - what do people think of helmets and airbags?

1200 hours or 12000 hours, it means very little, all pretty meaningless. It's what you do with those hours that count. I have a mate with barely 1500 tt but a large chunk of those on fast jets, worth far more than 12000 spent looking out the window while the autopilot flies.

The point I'm making is that if IO540 has 1200 hours then he's doing far better than the majority of private flyers and going places where most will never even attempt.

IO 540 and Fuji Abound are one of the main reasons I come to this forum. :ok:

Over how many hours of flight time in single engined pistons were your ten engine failures Guppy? I'm just curious to compare your experience with that of others here.

If you are speaking of engine stoppages where it never restarted:

Without doubt that is true for twins, where an enroute engine failure should be a non-event and would not be reported unless somebody wants to drag someone's nose through the dirt to draw attention to bad maintenance**. EFATOs often kill everyone aboard (they require good pilot currency) which helps to swell up the fatal accident stats for twins (another factor is the typically more demanding mission profiles flown in twins).

It may also be true for singles. I am certainly aware of cases (years ago) where somebody landed a school plane in a field, an instructor went to retrieve it, and flew it back, and no fault was found or reported. Maybe carb heat, who knows? But this would be very rare, because fields landings are not easy to cover up.

It has been suggested that engine failures are more common in twins than in singles; reasons offered have been a) more vibration, due to the engine being less rigidly mounted on the wing spars than on a single's firewall; b) longer control cable runs; c) longer fuel pipe runs; d) a pilot of a twin will be less aware of something "funny" with the engine because it is further away, so a fault can develop unnoticed; e) some twin owners, particularly some commercial operators, definitely have a less critical attitude to maintenance, running on condition, etc because they have a spare engine. The last one is controversial but enough twin owners have made this very clear that I don't doubt it for a moment ;)

Diamond went to avgas for their US sales of the DA40 but they continued to sell the Thielert DA42 out there. Go figure, as they say...

** Early on in my TB20 ownership, I had loads of problems with autopilot failures. (Actually they continued but got a lot less bad). One failure which happened with me not present, with the pilot who was an instructor (the fake-ATP one I referred to in previous postings) reporting that the aircraft was nearly inverted within seconds, was something I wanted to MOR. I was discouraged from doing this by various people, him included, on the grounds that a MOR will stick like the proverbial to a blanket. I am now less than 100% sure this incident actually happened (for reasons too long winded to go into here) but I did contact the CAA and they weren't too bothered about it.

Not quite...You are also required to report any "accident" in addition to the above and the definition of an accident is:

I guess in their wisdom that the FAA decided that
...was not "substantial damage"...though of course we weren't there and it may have not been as bad as I imagine from this description....

I am flattered - thank you. There are a great many posters on here I enjoy reading, yours included.

To be fair to Guppy he has a point. In reality hours count. In reality variety and expiences count for more. I have had the pleasure of flying with guys who have a huge number of hours on a large number of types. It shows, it shows from the moment they start flying the aircraft. I enjoyed doing my multi rating and I would recommend anyone do so, even if they dont go on to fly multis. Why? Well I think it stretches your flying skills so when you fly simple singles the management of the aircraft seems very straight forward. In the same way I would recommend anyone to do some aeros. I recall when I started a big grin and a lingering thought - "I cant believe the aircraft / I could do that". I had the great pleasure of spending a few hours in a propoer commercial sim recently. Working with the guys doing engine failures, engine fires, single engine approaches to minima, cat 111 approaches with an autopilot failure etc, all provides invaluable lessons.

Back to OP
 

As several have stated here it is all about risk management, or maybe more ,risk evaluation.

Several years back there was an article in a flying mag were the writer was unable to find a single case of an engine failure in the pattern causing a fatality or a reportable incident\accident in the NTSB data base. I read a lot of the NTSB summaries and cannot recall a single such event myself. (Take offs excepted, we had a very sad case here of a T-210 which ingested the recently, and improperly installed, air filter on take off. The pilot was killed)

In that period there were a large number of fatalities involving maneuvering flight in the pattern, often stalls on the base to final turn.

One problem of the old mantra of stay close enough to the airport to be able to land in the case of an engine failure is you edge in too close, setting yours self up for a steep turn at low altitude and airspeed. That is a dangerous corner to be in.

In terms of smoking holes it would seem keeping a wider pattern to avoid steep turns, a known and persistent hazard, and accepting the so small it is not recorded risk of an off airport landing due to an engine failure is a good deal.

20 driver

As an aside, our local field was an Enstrom dealer and flight school for several years. After the fields owners third auto rotate into someones back yard he called a truck, had the helicopter hauled away and got out of that business line. He is still with us at 80 plus.

Of course every bit helps but I get suspicious when somebody throws around numbers like 18000hrs. It is almost impossible to achieve that in GA; even high end GA. You would need to have been an instructor for several decades but then your experience is probably low (due to not going anywhere).

One has to be talking about long haul airline pilots.

Well Mr Guppy it is certainly a good story.

There is some phraseology in your report that a pilot would not use and is a bit of a give away, but you have done a good job otherwise.

If I were in that position, I would not give a flying f*** about what anybody on pprune thought about anything. I would be getting some sleep.

There are thousands of pilots with 18,000 hours plus.

I retired with over 30,000 accident free hours when I turned seventy, at that time I was still actively flying in the air show circuit in Europe.

I started my commercial flying career flying a J3 Cub spraying tobacco in southern Ontario.

Now that my flying career is spooling down I am building a Piper J3 clone which will bring my career full cycle.

In between those two time periods I have lost track of what I flew but it included a lot of different machines both fixed and rotary wing.

So 18,000 hours is really not that unusual.

Indeed, and I know quite a few myself (some ~25k) but not many log 18k hrs in GA.

Apart from some commercial opportunities most piston GA flight is not remunerated and to log 18k hrs you will spend of the order of US$2M (two million bucks) of your own money, after tax.

A typical airline pilot who flies piston GA also will not be flying IFR GA. Most of them get plenty of IFR at work and have zero interest in hacking IFR in piston singles or twins (I know this because I have flown with a fair number of them). They prefer to fly for fun, so they fly rag and tube types, homebuilts, etc. And they don't log 18k hrs in these.

So, not impossible - just exceedingly unusual.

Chuck

You need to have a word with or friend Mr Guppy, his accident record over a lot less hours looks like a disaster zone. Statistically you would want to keep him as far away as possible from anything with wings.

Question for Chuck
 

You've flown a lot of hours in a range of conditions. How many engine failures have you had? If any how many were in GA or piston operations?

Despite the digressions I think it is still an interesting question, what is the likely hood of an engine failure in GA?


Thanks

20driver

It's your constant reference to these hourly totals, which (except in highly unusual - in Europe - occupations) cannot have any relevance to this piston GA engine reliability debate.

I think the best order of magnitude guide is what was posted earlier by Englishal. Unless you are running particularly dubious practices, you are unlikely to get one before you finally fail your medical...

Unfortunately some people choose to interpret such a statement as saying that one should not train for one, etc. which is obviously completely wrong.

Let me guess.... you are in the military???
OK, Now we are getting somewhere.

Now I know what line of work you are not in: statistics :ugh:

Just as well, since 87.3% of statistics are made up on the spot, and if you ran the business it would be 100%.

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::O:O:O

That's 50/50 possibilities, which are different from probabilities.

For example you either are or are not a pilot. The possibilities are 50/50. The probabilities need not be.

I would love to read the rest of that story. Did there happen to be a handy airport at the bottom of the canyon or a road from which the aircraft could subsequently be recovered.

By the way you dont happen to know DFC do you?

DFC is the man you should marry. It would be a marriage made in heaven.