Hey guys!
Jon from fly8MA.com, and today I'm here to prove to you that when the engine fails on
your airplane, it will not just simply fall out of the sky.
We're going to take a close look at what to do immediately following an engine failure,
and shortly thereafter, and what you can do to get your airplane successfully on the ground,
and yourself on the ground, all in one piece, rather uneventfully too.
So sit back, relax, and we'll get right to it.
Let's go ahead and talk about what would happen if we had an engine failure.
We want to do our T, we want to do our fuel selector valve on, mixture, throttle, carb
heat, mags, primer-- check all that.
If that doesn't do it for us, then we may actually be making a power-off landing.
So here, our engine has failed, we're officially a glider.
We do our fuel valve on, mixture, throttle full, carb heat on, mixture, mags, we have
our primers in and locked, we could try restarting the engine since the prop is not windmilling,
we could pull our starter and try to restart it.
Since we're so close to the runway, we're going to simply continue in this approach,
and make a nice, safe landing on the runway.
We're holding our best glide speed here, all the way through until we determine otherwise.
If we're too high again we could go on the back side of the power curve to get lower,
we could go on the front side of the power curve to get lower.
We can use flaps as needed.
I'm going to defer putting in flaps until I'm sure I have the runway made.
It looks like I have the runway made here, so I'll go ahead and put some flaps in.
When all of that's said and you're set on your landing approach, then you could go ahead
and make your radio call.
"Venice Traffic, Cessna 8MA, final 13, Venice."
I'm going to use 23 degrees of flaps here.
And just like a normal approach, I'm holding the airplane off until she's ready to land.
And there we are.
Now we can go ahead and get our engine restarted.
So as your engine begins failing here, and you see that RPM decaying, you feel the roughness
in the engine, there are a few key things you're going to want to be doing.
Each airplanes going to have its own procedure, but in this particular airplane, we want to
do a T. So in many Cessnas you're going to come down, verify that your fuel selector
is either on or on both, make sure your mixture is full rich, make sure your power is all
the way in, carb heat is on, make sure your mags run both, or maybe cycle them left and
right, both, trying to see if one mag will make the engine run better than the other.
You'll also go ahead and verify that the primer is in and locked, and then if all of those
things fail, and you're committed to making a power-off landing, at that point you'd want
to secure the engine.
You'd want to be pulling the mixture to idle cutoff, pulling the throttle back, turning
the mags off, turning the fuel selector valve off so it doesn't accidentally start running
on you when you're about to land in a field and you happen to leave the throttle set full,
and all of a sudden you're about to touch down and then you get a burst of power that
carries you into the trees at the other end of the field you're trying to land in.
Now, aside from this, aside from managing the engine, there are other ways you could
troubleshoot.
You could try pumping the throttle, trying to push fuel into the engine with the accelerator
pump.
You could try pumping the primer, but for the most part, unless you have a lot of altitude
to work with, those aren't things you really want to focus on.
You ultimately just want to focus on finding a place to land, pitching to your best glide
speed, and getting the airplane on the ground as soon as possible.
Those are your main goals.
Now when it comes to choosing a place to land, we of course practice this maneuver right
above the airport, so we had a runway right next to us.
But it's important to note that when I was looking at the runway I wasn't aiming for
the beginning of the runway to touch down there.
I was actually aiming for the 1000 foot markers or even a little beyond it, well over 1000
feet down the runway from the beginning of the start of the payment.
Plus, I had a whole bunch of grass before that pavement even started, so that if I had
to land then I absolutely could, and then just roll onto the runway.
There were no obstacles, I was aiming well far down past the obstacles.
A lot of people when you pull the engine on students and practice this in training, will
often aim for a field and they'll aim right for the beginning of the field, right where
the treeline is, or right where the power lines are, expecting to cross those and then
land shortly thereafter, and having a whole bunch of field in front of them because they
like to have runway in front of them.
The trouble with this, is if you catch a downdraft, if you miscalculate your glide ratio, if you
misjudged at all, and there's extra drag involved, and you can't make your intended point of
touchdown right at the beginning of that field, or the beginning of the runway, you're going
to land short.
As you can see here, if we were coming into this particular airport, and we were to land
short of the field, we would be landing either on the roadway and hitting a fence, or going
into the power lines.
If you're making an emergency landing, you want to make sure that you're aiming far enough
down the runway, or down your field, that you will touch down and not hit an obstacle
like trees or power lines.
Its much better to actually overshoot touchdown, get the breaks on for just a few moments before
you hit the trees at the other end of the field, and you hit them going, say, 20 or
30 miles per hour, compared to misjudging, flying at 70 miles per hour and hitting the
trees at the beginning of the field at 70mph.
There's a much better chance of you walking away if you just drive your airplane into
trees at 20mph, than doing it flying at 70mph and falling the last 20 feet to the ground.
And also probably stopping very suddenly too.
So, that's my advice to you on choosing a point to aim for when you are performing an
emergency engine failure procedure, whether it be practice or for real.
Hopefully, you guys never have to actually do this for real.
But if you do, hopefully, this helps prepare you to do it better.
If you guys have any questions at all, leave them in the comments below, make sure you
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We'll see you all next time.