I'v emuch enjoyed the textual ping pong and so cannot resist joining in - a little.

With a thousand hours (all of which I have paid for!) I have had 2 partial engine failures.

The first was climbing out and the options looked pretty limited. Thankfully as the nose went down to 'best glide' speed the fuel supply refilled the carb and with a series of climbs and glides I got to 1500 ft and this allowed a sensible circuit to be flown. Mechanical fuel pump unable to pull fuel from a low tank.
In that case 'instinct' kicked in and I simply flew the aircraft.

The second time a cylinder head on the Gipsy cracked and meant the engine started to shake the aircraft to bits. In this case I did suffer from a ' is this really happening', 'surely not' period when to be honest I was well behind the aircraft. Even after sorting myself out and finding a power setting which almost maintained height I found myself in a state of disbelief. My immaculately maintained engine could not be doing this etc...

But to be fair it kept going long enough to take me out of the mountains and to a large military runway (gently descending all the way).

But Guppy's comments about disbelief and lack of preparededness do really strike a chord with me.

That incident really did change my mental model - to the point that when my ANR headset battery gave out recently I already had a field, high key and circuit, carb heat and fuel selection sorted out before I noticed what had caused the big increase in noise.....

I don't think that is strictly true. I think that if you dwell on the chance of a SE engine failure all the time then one would never fly anywhere past gliding rang of a landing spot. One would never fly it at night, and one would never fly over water or do anything "adventurous" like cross the north atlantic. It is good to be prepared for one and react properly if it does happen.

I prefer to increase my chances by running an engine in good condition, an engine that has been dynamically balanced along with prop, an engine which has been maintained properly, never run out of fuel and make sure I check the oil every time I take off. Proper engine monitoring also increases the odds. If then the engine lets go, then at least I know I have done my best to minimize the risk.

I have read numerous stories of high time pilots who have had many engine failures and one of the last i read was about a chap in his twin who's engine let go (BTW he had 10000's of hours). But as the story unfolded it appears the engines had done something like 2600 hrs and were being run on condition - which IMHO increases the chances of the engine failing.

The same goes for flight testing at night over the desert (Arizona?). IF something goes wrong, your chances of sucessful recovery are reduced. Obviously being in a corporate environment then there is more pressure on pilots to fly when maybe they don't want to.

I remember sitting at the end of the runway in the RHS of a King Air just after the heavens had opened up, staring into this biggest blackest sky you could imagine with Cb's forecast...and staring at the hole in the dash where the weather radar used to live, but had been removed for maintenance. Had I been flying myself in my aeroplane, I'd have taxied back and had a cup of tea, but we had no choice (it really was a matter of life or death)....so off we went. That was the second time in my short decade of flying that I was actually reasonably scared (bearing in mind ATC in the UK can't paint weather on the radar).

I don't think anyone on here goes around believing that.

I think the difference of perspective on this issue shown by different posters comes from the differing aviation backgrounds. For most of the serious private pilots on here their experience consists of usually flying a relatively small selection of light aircraft on quite a regular basis in a usually quite safe operating environment. The aircraft in question are usually the tried and tested GA designs that even in the case of the newer ones usually use engines that have proven reliability records established over thousands of hours of trouble free flying. For those who are lucky enough to own their own aircraft it will usually be maintained lovingly and kept in a dry hangar.

None of that means that these pilots aren't vigilant about engine failures; certainly whenever I line up on the runway in a twin engine failure is what I'm thinking about and when in the air in a single when not fiddling with the G1000 or whatever I'll be looking down at the countryside (and out for traffic as well obviously) thinking about which fields look the most inviting for a forced landing.

I sometimes fly IMC in a single and have occasionally at night as well although I wasn't very happy about it. There have been occasions, breaking out of cloud at 300ft on the ILS for example when yes, if I had had an engine failure 30 seconds earlier a safe landing may have been unlikely but by generally avoiding situations like that and being alert for the 90% of the time when a forced landing would be possible after an engine failure I believe I have reduced the risk to a level that I am happy with.

The biggest problem is that anybody who posts here saying they don't worry about an engine failure is going to get shot down in flames.

There was even one bloke who wrote somewhere that he was "terrified" every time he flew, and he regarded this as the correct attitude, and I think many would agree.

I cannot think of anything worse. If I was terrified every time I went up I would pack it in and take up cross-stitching.

The likelihood of an engine failure with a correctly maintained and correctly managed certified engine is very very small. They do happen, which is why one cannot disregard them, and one manages the risk by carrying a life raft, avoiding large built-up areas whenever possible, flying at a high altitude whenever possible (an IR helps a great deal there), etc.

Engine management is important, but is difficult to do correctly in the typical GA rental spamcan context, because there is no or almost no engine instrumentation, so you could be running at a very high CHT and not know it. Thankfully cylinder cracks rarely stop an engine dead. An aircraft owner can install an EDM700, read up on the matter, and never look back. It is a wonderful instrument - if your headset batteries go flat you take a look at the EGTs and if they look normal ...

Fuel management is obviously vital but again is difficult to do in the GA rental spamcan context, because of crappy fuel gauges, and a long tradition in the training system of accepting previous flights' paper log entries as evidence of fuel on board (look up G-OMAR for a super example). Again, an aircraft owner can install a fuel totaliser (the existing gauges have to be left in place) and be precise to within 1% as to his fuel status. I have done 900nm flights and landed within 1 or 2 litres of the FOB which was computed during the flight. Likewise if you suspect a loss of power, take one look at the fuel flow (displayed to 0.1 litre/hr) and if that's OK and the EGTs are OK then the engine is making the power.

The above two things probably take out the majority of engine failures. As for the rest, the best thing is to avoid using UK engine shops :)

Now I better get off pprune because, according to DFC (oops I meant Mr Guppy) I have a 50% chance of dying today.

Guppy,

I find it some what unbelievable that certain people on here are determined to discredit your experience and try to make silly remarks about a very serious subject they clearly do not understand.

I do not have your level of experience yet but I also fly in very tough commercial environments where engine failure is always in the for front of my mind when flying around, nearly always at max gross and often only 500ft.

I learnt in the SE of the England, Redhill to be precise many years ago but have now operated in many countries as a commercial pilot. I now fly in a DHC2 on floats I have to contend with a low level turn after takeoff over rough land at least six times a day, if the engine decides to blow at this point I have seconds to react and that is why my mind is in failure escape mode whilst flying.

I think that a couple of the less professional hobby pilots on here think that means worrying about it all day, this is not the case it is just being very very aware and ready for the worst at all times, that means expecting it and having a plan.

I have had two partial engine failures in my time both meant an unstoppable descent rate, and it was planning and preparation that allowed me to put a bush strip between the ground and the plane in time.

Fuji,

Stop questioning Guppies experience, it is very obvious that he is exactly what he says he is and it only shows your lack of experience very very clearly that you cannot see it. You have realise that your flying environment is very undemanding and as a hobbyist you do not really have the experience and knowledge to judge people who fly for a living and really know about aviation. Oh by the way the guy who did my float rating had 34000hrs TT and 22000hrs on floats, so that kind of blows the you can't get those sort of hours in GA out the water.

Engines do fail and if you put the hours in the odds are one day it will be you as Guppy said "its not if its when".

I have not posted on pprune in months because its has so many complete plonkers on it, this will be my only post as nothing has changed.

Cheers

Is that not a rather inconsistent attitude to take though? I mean you don't fly single IFR, which can be safe provided the cloudbase is high enough for you to get a reasonable look at the ground before making a forced landed, yet are prepared to fly around mountains so low that you have no chance of making a forced landing...

You must be CIA.

I am ex Spetnatz; we may have met in Afghanistan, back in 1978.

You lot were a lot better paid.

If by genuine you mean someone who posts using their true name then i guess I'm genuine.

Whenever I make a statement or express an opinion I try and make sure I can back up what I say with some facts.

Is this in Afghanistan? Which operator is using single engine pistons out there?

Reaper? :}

Yup Chuck's genuine alright! He is a great host! I went to visit him a few months back.

So now you have the confirmation that whoever Pilot DAR is, I vouch for Chuck!

Chuck, that, and a few bucks will get you coffee lotsa places!

Cheers, Jim...

Hmmn... Long ago when I flew as a flight engineer on Shackletons our Griffon engines were so over used that we expected an engine failure on every mission.

The usual failure mode was rough running / fluctuating oil pressure followed by a flailing con rod which could cut through the engine case and neatly sever the prop oil feed pipes which ran through the vee of the two banks of cylinders. This would cause the prop to go to fine pitch, overspeed and complete the engine's self destruction, which having caught fire would now be torn from the wing.

As a result Shack crews were hypersensitive about unusual engine indications, feathering the suspect engine in seconds in a flurry of hands on levers and buttons. The mark III Shackleton could only just maintain height on three engines so we would light up one of the two viper jets fitted in the ourboard nacelles in order to get us home. However when far out in the Atlantic or Artic sea the jet engine would use up all our fuel before reaching land, so we climbed, shut down the jet, gradually descended, lit up the jet, climbed....ad nauseum. :bored:

One day, flying a mark II Shack over the Irish sea, consternation reigned in my crew, because all four engines were running rough and the mark II Shack did not have two 'get us home' Viper jets. As a 22 year old junior flight eng I hadn't a clue as to what was wrong and suspected contaminated fuel. I recommended landing at the nearest airfield which turned out to be Shannon airport in the Republic of Ireland, and we being RAF nearly caused a diplomatic incident. :uhoh:

With hindsight perhaps that was my first taste of carb icing.

Still interested in the main topic
 

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

Exactly and that has enrichened my life immensely by having met so many new friends, such as Pilot DAR who was kind enough to visit me and even gave me free advice on some structural changes I am making to my Cub project.

I started using my real name in these forums because I was in the advanced flight training business and by being open in my communications it served me well with my clients all over the world and it also keeps me from being a real prick sometimes when I get annoyed by some posters. :E:E

I post on here at various times and useally on subjects that I have experience off. If I don't have anything to say on a subject I don't post but I can't help noticing that sometimes I read other threads and there are a few people that have an opinion on every subject.
It's also very obvious that there are a lot of nonuts that no nothing about the subjects that they post about and are quick to ridicule anyone else.
I agree with the above people that point out the failings of being anonomous.
For the record, and if anyone wants to check out the validity of any of my claims/statements on here , my name is John Cook, I fly out of Tibenham where I am well known and anything that I post can be verified.
I hereby challange some of the naysayers on here to be as honest as to their identity. :)

I was just curious Guppy to know where in the world you had been flying in a single engine piston and been concerned about small arms fire and other ground to air threats? I promise I'm not trying to wind you up, just curious. :)

Any one else feel like "coming out?" ;)

Dave Wilson, glider of gliders since 1989, Silver 'C', currently 'resting' while I finish a degree. Hope to be airborne again next spring. Well, let me rephrase that, I will be airborne again by next spring.

Toying with the idea of doing a PPL but feel that it's a passing phase and I'm going to spend the 6 or so grand in a share of a mighty glass ship instead.

Surely, you can "come out" only if you are gay? :)

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.

Closer to home, it is not possible to write anything of value on a lot of aviation stuff e.g. maintenance practices, other than under a pseudonym, because the field is ridden with so much incompetence and even malpractice.

And the CAA reads these forums; that much is clear from the speed with which they have taken some things off their website after the URL appeared in the Pprune medical forum :)

I know of a semi-private forum where full names have recently been enforced and this coincided with a rapid drop in the contributions. To be fair, it did not help that one chap (an aviation business) joined up, didn't like some past postings, and threatened to sue some people, but if people used nicknames he might not have been able to do that. That incident taught people a lesson and I can see a lot of them dropped off after that.

Many years ago, Compuserve ran a load of forums where your full name had to match the one under which the account was billed. These forums were OK up to a point but were much less useful than anything subsequently on the internet.

Here, most regulars know each other, and many have met up, but nicknames keep the search engines from adding 2 and 2.

Surely, you can "come out" only if you are gay?

Watch out for my pink aeroplane.

"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.........

Bit late to hide *my* name, I suppose...

Good luck with that budget ;-)

HA! We are getting nearer. Guppy worked as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo.

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.

I once asked, in another place where I use my real name (nothing to do with flying), "what's my PPRuNe handle then"?

Someone came up with the answer within minutes.

So one way you could reverse the process would be to find that conversation :)

That phrase doesn't come up on google (in quotes). Googling on phrases (in quotes) is ever so slick.

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!

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

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?:hmm:

'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.

I meant good luck getting a PPL for 6k (I hear that it can be done in some places, but I think they're pretty few and far between). I do a bit of gliding too, and it's always a shock to compare the costs of the two!

If you do manage to stretch to an Ash26, though, bring it up to Portmoak some day and show it off ;)

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 :confused:)

Orf to Orstralia in a minute on the quite wondrous A380 so I'll be off here for a couple of months.

Yep, not a bad price you've got there. Enjoy the 380 experience too, I'm dead curious to know what they're like inside!

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!
:ok:

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Or perhaps just few posting on pprune.

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.