Gentlemen,
This Forum has a lot of pilot members and those of us who fly often wonder how things would work out if we had an engine failure during a cross-country flight. Well, after 34 years of flying I finally got to find out. Two weeks ago, with my son Charley home on Christmas vacation, he needed to return to Texas A&M for an evening meeting with his fraternity. It's a 1000 mile flight from my home airport, Falcon Field in Mesa, Arizona which normally takes about three hours and 50 minutes in my Glasair III that cruises at 265 mph. I have about 1000 aerobatic hours in this aircraft over the last 18 years and have flown it coast-to-coast on the airshow circuit countless times. It's a very small, all composite, two-seat aircraft that is fairly heavy because it's constructed with fiberglass which weighs more than a comparably built aluminum aircraft, but much stronger. It also has a huge 540 cubic inch Lycoming fuel injected motor stuffed in the nose and that, combined with a small wing, makes for a very fast little airplane but.......those features also make it an airplane that does not glide very well because the wing loading is as high as that of a Beechcraft twin-engine turboprop King Air. With gear and flaps down the engine out sink rate exceeds 3000 ft./m and my little plane has a landing speed of 120 mph, a touchdown speed some light planes will not achieve at full throttle in flight. Cleaned up, with the gear in the wells and the flaps retracted the engine out sink rate is still 1500 ft./m at a best glide speed of 150 mph.
About 200 miles east of El Paso Texas during one of my instrument scans, I noticed that my oil pressure was ever so slightly lower than normal. Oil temperature looked fine and all other readings were normal. Still, that indication had my Spidey sense tingling and I paid more attention to alternate fields as I passed overhead. Ever so slightly and bit by bit, oil pressure continued to drop which should have given me an increase in oil temperature, but my oil temperature stayed the same. Was my oil pressure gauge failing? I also have a low oil pressure light which was not giving me any indications of a problem. I asked Charley to hand me my Jeppeson Airport Databook so I could look up which field in front of us had a maintenance shop. San Angelo, Texas was 50 miles ahead and was the closest airport with aircraft repair.
I told Charley he was going to miss his meeting and that I needed to get this airplane on the ground. Up to that point Charley had no idea anything was going wrong but my declaration made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. What's going on dad? Is our plane okay? "I'm not sure" is the best answer I could give him.
I stayed up high, at 11,500 feet, with the ground elevation of 2000 feet in that area I had 9500 feet to work with if things went south. 15 miles outside of San Angelo I called up the tower and was cleared to land with no other traffic in the area. At that moment my oil pressure fell off sharply, oil pressure light came on, engine felt very rough, yet oil temperature remained cool. I would find out later that my oil temperature gauge had failed. A little over 10 miles away from San Angelo - BANG, oil pressure dropped to zero and my engine stopped making power. I pulled the prop to course pitch to try and lessen drag and my propeller was still windmilling which I believed would give me a slightly better glide rate.
The runway at San Angelo is right over the top of a huge lake so if we came up short we were going to get wet. Once I dropped the landing gear I knew my plane would glide about as well as a set of car keys, but at least it would float about as well as an anvil. Charley was most excited at this point. Are we on fire? Are we going to have to jump? Am I going to die? Talk to me dad? "Shut up Charley, I can't talk right now, we are only going to have one shot at this". As I was cleared to land and did not want to waste time talking to the tower I decided not to declare an emergency. A quick mental calculation told me that with a sink rate of 1500 ft./m I would be able to cover that 10 miles and turn final with about 2000 feet of altitude remaining.
We were both wearing parachutes but thankfully, it looked like we would not be using them today. As I closed in on my turn to final I put the nose down to burn off my excess altitude and with no oil pressure, my windmilling constant speed propeller oversped badly. I don't know how it could of done that, perhaps my crankshaft was broken, but when a constant speed prop exceeds its design limits by more than 10%, there is a risk of breaking one of the blades out of the hub. When that happens the imbalance tears the engine clean out of the airframe and a fatal crash is certain. I pulled the nose up to slow the plane and the propeller, dumping my gear and flaps at the same time. Now however, I was way too high to land.
I pitched my little Glasair sideways in the most radical slip to land I've ever done while S-turning at the same time. We fell out of the sky like a rock and I straightened out about 100 feet from the ground halfway down the runway at 120 mph. We made a beautiful touchdown, retracted the flaps to give me more traction, and stood on the brakes. I had enough momentum at the last turn off to coast off the runway and about 40 yards onto the ramp where we came to a stop. I don't remember when the prop stopped windmilling and when we popped the canopies the stench of smoke and burnt oil wafted up from our exhaust pipes. The belly of our aircraft was coated with a thick black layer of soot.
Charley couldn't wait to get the hell out. Both the oil filter and the screen were full of large chunks of various types of metal. My custom-built 500 hour old Lycoming was now scrap metal. The control tower had no idea that we were in trouble and I wasn't going to tell them now. We were on the ground, everything worked out, Charley was fine, and that's all I really cared about.
We spent the night in a hotel and caught a commercial flight back to Phoenix the next day. The shop pulled my engine, crated it, and sent it back to Barrett Aircraft Engines in Oklahoma. I sent a crew to pull the wing off my plane, put it and the fuselage in a jig and haul them both on a flatbed back to Arizona where my aircraft will be reassembled and await its new engine. I will test fly it, and I should be back in the air within a couple months. The photo below is a copy of a poster we gave away at airshows, the picture was taken at the Sun & Fun Airshow in Lakeland, Florida by an EAA photographer.
An interesting side note. Over the last couple months I have been going out to Midland Texas to work with GT ace Ray Hofman on flying emergency maneuvers. Ray is a new pilot with some very high performance aircraft and he's also a very quick study who enjoyed even the most radical aerobatics, spins, slips, and stalls that we practiced. Someday, I thought that type of training might just save his life if something went wrong. As it turns out, all of that recent practice with Ray might have just saved my life as it was all fresh when I really needed it.
All's well that ends well.
Chip
This Forum has a lot of pilot members and those of us who fly often wonder how things would work out if we had an engine failure during a cross-country flight. Well, after 34 years of flying I finally got to find out. Two weeks ago, with my son Charley home on Christmas vacation, he needed to return to Texas A&M for an evening meeting with his fraternity. It's a 1000 mile flight from my home airport, Falcon Field in Mesa, Arizona which normally takes about three hours and 50 minutes in my Glasair III that cruises at 265 mph. I have about 1000 aerobatic hours in this aircraft over the last 18 years and have flown it coast-to-coast on the airshow circuit countless times. It's a very small, all composite, two-seat aircraft that is fairly heavy because it's constructed with fiberglass which weighs more than a comparably built aluminum aircraft, but much stronger. It also has a huge 540 cubic inch Lycoming fuel injected motor stuffed in the nose and that, combined with a small wing, makes for a very fast little airplane but.......those features also make it an airplane that does not glide very well because the wing loading is as high as that of a Beechcraft twin-engine turboprop King Air. With gear and flaps down the engine out sink rate exceeds 3000 ft./m and my little plane has a landing speed of 120 mph, a touchdown speed some light planes will not achieve at full throttle in flight. Cleaned up, with the gear in the wells and the flaps retracted the engine out sink rate is still 1500 ft./m at a best glide speed of 150 mph.
About 200 miles east of El Paso Texas during one of my instrument scans, I noticed that my oil pressure was ever so slightly lower than normal. Oil temperature looked fine and all other readings were normal. Still, that indication had my Spidey sense tingling and I paid more attention to alternate fields as I passed overhead. Ever so slightly and bit by bit, oil pressure continued to drop which should have given me an increase in oil temperature, but my oil temperature stayed the same. Was my oil pressure gauge failing? I also have a low oil pressure light which was not giving me any indications of a problem. I asked Charley to hand me my Jeppeson Airport Databook so I could look up which field in front of us had a maintenance shop. San Angelo, Texas was 50 miles ahead and was the closest airport with aircraft repair.
I told Charley he was going to miss his meeting and that I needed to get this airplane on the ground. Up to that point Charley had no idea anything was going wrong but my declaration made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. What's going on dad? Is our plane okay? "I'm not sure" is the best answer I could give him.
I stayed up high, at 11,500 feet, with the ground elevation of 2000 feet in that area I had 9500 feet to work with if things went south. 15 miles outside of San Angelo I called up the tower and was cleared to land with no other traffic in the area. At that moment my oil pressure fell off sharply, oil pressure light came on, engine felt very rough, yet oil temperature remained cool. I would find out later that my oil temperature gauge had failed. A little over 10 miles away from San Angelo - BANG, oil pressure dropped to zero and my engine stopped making power. I pulled the prop to course pitch to try and lessen drag and my propeller was still windmilling which I believed would give me a slightly better glide rate.
The runway at San Angelo is right over the top of a huge lake so if we came up short we were going to get wet. Once I dropped the landing gear I knew my plane would glide about as well as a set of car keys, but at least it would float about as well as an anvil. Charley was most excited at this point. Are we on fire? Are we going to have to jump? Am I going to die? Talk to me dad? "Shut up Charley, I can't talk right now, we are only going to have one shot at this". As I was cleared to land and did not want to waste time talking to the tower I decided not to declare an emergency. A quick mental calculation told me that with a sink rate of 1500 ft./m I would be able to cover that 10 miles and turn final with about 2000 feet of altitude remaining.
We were both wearing parachutes but thankfully, it looked like we would not be using them today. As I closed in on my turn to final I put the nose down to burn off my excess altitude and with no oil pressure, my windmilling constant speed propeller oversped badly. I don't know how it could of done that, perhaps my crankshaft was broken, but when a constant speed prop exceeds its design limits by more than 10%, there is a risk of breaking one of the blades out of the hub. When that happens the imbalance tears the engine clean out of the airframe and a fatal crash is certain. I pulled the nose up to slow the plane and the propeller, dumping my gear and flaps at the same time. Now however, I was way too high to land.
I pitched my little Glasair sideways in the most radical slip to land I've ever done while S-turning at the same time. We fell out of the sky like a rock and I straightened out about 100 feet from the ground halfway down the runway at 120 mph. We made a beautiful touchdown, retracted the flaps to give me more traction, and stood on the brakes. I had enough momentum at the last turn off to coast off the runway and about 40 yards onto the ramp where we came to a stop. I don't remember when the prop stopped windmilling and when we popped the canopies the stench of smoke and burnt oil wafted up from our exhaust pipes. The belly of our aircraft was coated with a thick black layer of soot.
Charley couldn't wait to get the hell out. Both the oil filter and the screen were full of large chunks of various types of metal. My custom-built 500 hour old Lycoming was now scrap metal. The control tower had no idea that we were in trouble and I wasn't going to tell them now. We were on the ground, everything worked out, Charley was fine, and that's all I really cared about.
We spent the night in a hotel and caught a commercial flight back to Phoenix the next day. The shop pulled my engine, crated it, and sent it back to Barrett Aircraft Engines in Oklahoma. I sent a crew to pull the wing off my plane, put it and the fuselage in a jig and haul them both on a flatbed back to Arizona where my aircraft will be reassembled and await its new engine. I will test fly it, and I should be back in the air within a couple months. The photo below is a copy of a poster we gave away at airshows, the picture was taken at the Sun & Fun Airshow in Lakeland, Florida by an EAA photographer.
An interesting side note. Over the last couple months I have been going out to Midland Texas to work with GT ace Ray Hofman on flying emergency maneuvers. Ray is a new pilot with some very high performance aircraft and he's also a very quick study who enjoyed even the most radical aerobatics, spins, slips, and stalls that we practiced. Someday, I thought that type of training might just save his life if something went wrong. As it turns out, all of that recent practice with Ray might have just saved my life as it was all fresh when I really needed it.
All's well that ends well.
Chip
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