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Congrats on your safe landing and your son's Air Force retirement!
My son is also a Viper pilot. bob |
Great story and even better ending! Great job staying calm and focused!..... I shut the engine down on my 7 a few weeks ago for the first time over a 10,000' runway airport (no one in the vicinity) and glided for 2 minutes to test my best glide speed! It took me 2 years to work up the nerve to do this but I'm glad I did. I wanted to know what it feels like. Actually it was no different than Idle and the rate of decent was very close to idle. I did not stop the prop. The engine fired right back up when I shoved the mixture in. I still had 4,000' so there was no pressure.
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Glad everything worked out for ya.. |
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After the event did you take a look under the cowl to see if there were any obvious signs of a source of oil loss (i.e. oil hose unsecured). I must admit my sense of curiosity would have driven me to immediately whip off the cowl and have a look. If there was a lot of oil loss you might have been very lucky there was no in-flight FWF fire. As you said, sometimes it's more important to be lucky than good. |
Nice Job!
Good work Bill! I'd expect nothing less👍
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Great exercise to get a feel for how to handle it. However, don't know if I would shut the engine down. You can get the same result with the throttle pulled to idle. Bill |
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Another viewpoint on this...
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Generally, I'm against shutting down an engine for "test" reasons if not needed, especially if it's the only one installed on the aircraft. For whatever reason, if you do so and it fails to restart, you've just turned your "simulated" emergency into the real deal...and you did it to yourself, to boot. An old flying buddy tells me when ideas like this occur to me to think "How will what I did sound, from the FAA investigation backwards." While it might appear that the risks might be low due to proximity to the airport, runway length, etc., it's the unplanned, can't happen "stuff" that somehow occurs that can suddenly take you someplace you never thought you'd end up. If the engine doesn't restart, stress levels will go up (a lot) and the calm, logical computing device your brain was up till this point will likely go into abacus mode and probably be somewhere in airspace 5 disbelieving minutes behind your current location. And for what? A datapoint, that, all things being equal was probably already possessed (either from this website or flight test at idle) and was close enough to being "real life" useful to negate any gain vs the risk taken. If really wanting to fly and learn what it's like to land without a motor is what's desired, my suggestion is that the safest avenue would be to reach out to a glider club with an older, early generation glider like a SGS 2-33 or something similar. Schedule several flights with their biggest, fattest instructor and put as much ballast weight in as the gross weight allows. Go out on a hot day, take a 3000' (or more) tow over the airport, release, and fully deploy the spoilers and leave them out till landing (or until the IP says otherwise.) Spiral down, set up your high and low key and see how well you do spotting the landing. Safe, great fun, and you help the local glider club stay solvent. While I'm not sure the 2-33 will quite have matching glide performance as an engine-out RV, I'm betting it will be a reasonable enough simulation (the 2-33 is a pretty doggy glider) to be close. The head game you'll play trading off altitude, pattern location and landing spot will keep your Mark I/Mod 0 CPU plenty busy enough not to notice the difference is what I'll bet. Do it 2 or 3 times in a day, and you'll be done and ready for a beer. It will boost your confidence in your being able to plan and execute a successful off-field landing if it became necessary, and at much less risk to yourself, the aircraft you've worked so hard to complete and the family that wants you to come home after playing with your pride and joy. Off my soapbox. |
Good thinking
Rob, pretty good thinking for an Aggie. :D
Longhorn85 |
Engine out
If I might address an important step in this whole process:
If you ever experience severe vibration....KILL the engine first, before doing anything else. Had this happen to me In a Baby Ace 2 yrs ago ( prop delamination )......at 1500' after takeoff. Didn't kill the engine. Landed, but lucky to be alive....engine mount barely stayed together....broken in multiple places. Only a bit of skill, a lot of luck, and most importantly, the good Lord kept me alive that day. Marvin |
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Why was I so prepared to do what I did as well as shutting down the engine if necessary? Because I was a "student" of the Midget/Formula 1 racing airplanes and this was the ONLY option for dealing with a broken prop-an all too frequent occurance on the racers. There is another scenario that is just as potentially dangerous-exhaust failure. The ONLY safe option with an exhaust failure is to shut off the fuel and secure the engine. If you got away with continuing to an airport miles away you have used up about two feet of your lifetime yardstick of good luck. A certain HRII pilot would likely be alive today if he had shut off the fuel IMMEDIATELY. |
The circumstances of an engine failure are variable and unpredictable.
It is impossible to plan for it except fly the airplane, do not panic letting it slow and stall trying to avoid descending. Maintain glide speed whatever you determine it to be. There probably won't be many choices to land. Pick a spot and fly to or into it. The chances of surviving are good. Stall and spin, the chances of surviving are zero. And AMEN to dealing with vibration. That has to be dealt with immediately. Had an exhaust pipe failure with pusher that took out prop, vibration was horrific. Some special force made my hand pull the mixture immediately, did not even think about it. |
Good advice, David.
Many, many years ago on a cross-country in my Cessna 180 a severe vibration accompanied by a windshield covered with black oil and oil pressure/oil temp indications rapidly heading the wrong way was a real attention-getter causing me to start pulling everything back and pitching up until I was assured the stopped prop was intact. Fortunately, I had enough altitude to make it to an airport (Norman, OK) with no other difficulties other than having to land peeping thru the open side window. Turned out to be a piston failure apparently on the compression stroke blowing off the oil filler cap thereby dumping over 10 quarts on my windshield. Not my first unscheduled letdown nor my last but proves rarely does any inflight emergency fit any previously rehearsed set of procedures except fly the airplane first and save the troubleshooting until the airplane is safely back on the ground. |
First chance to do some trouble shooting for the cause of the engine out. I drrained 6 qts of oil from the engine. Took out the oil screen. It was plugged with metal shavings which stopped the oil flow to the engine. Not sure there was anything I could have done to prevent this. I do engine compression checks each annual condition inspection. I send in an oil sample to a company to do an analysis of the oil with each oil change. Nothing has been out of the ordinary. Bill
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Yes and the G3X the same, I just watch the ForeFlight video and it made me think of this thread, very useful if one does not have the luxury of either G3X or Dynon but has the Ipad handy.
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Engine
Thanks for the report. Congrats on successful outcome. Please post more info when the cause is determined. Thanks.
Don Broussard RV9 Rebuild in Progress 57 Pacer |
Has anyone herd why this engine produced metal shavings?
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Engine shutdown
Not a fan of engine shutdown, aircooled cylinders
getting colder then quick start up and wonder why my pistons and cylinders are scuffed up, mmmmm? |
Shutdown
And I know this is an old post, but you
should never stop being congratulated on a successful emergency landing that you or your crew can walk away from. Well done! |
I own this plane now.
Absolutely Love it. I'd post some pictures but have no idea how to do it, most forums just let you attach from pics on the computer, not this one. [ed. Congrats on your RV’s return to the skies and thanks for closing the loop on this. RE: the images, if you can fly a plane you can easily insert pics. The instructions are linked at the top left of every page in the forums and can be accessed directly here: http://www.vansairforce.net/articles...ums/images.htm. I see you have a low post count, so you may not have been aware of the link. v/r,dr] |
good to hear you are ok
Sorry you had issues but really glad you were able to save yourself and the airplane. Will be interested also in the engine analysis. I am an hour away if you need any help with anything.
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N46BV is alive and well
Thanks for the link and advise for uploading my photos.
I purchased this RV-8 last fall, from a guy who purchased it from the owner/builder, Bill Anton who had the forced landing. The guy I bought it from only had it for about a month, he told me that he mentioned to his wife that the plane scared him a bit and she said something like 'I'm not getting in it at all", as soon as I saw it on Tradaplane I called him about it. I don't know the final results on why the original engine failed, but Bill installed a brand new Lycoming Thunderbolt IO-360 and now I have a great plane with 300 hrs. on the engine. I purchased 2 Aerovonics AV-30's, Trio EZ pilot and Flyleds landing/taxi lights I hope to get all installed next month. I did my transitional training with Bruce Bohannon, awesome guy! I also removed the chains and installed the steering linkage bar, a massive improvement as far as I'm concerned, a whole different animal on the ground. Here goes with the pics. Brian |
Brian, all your pictures show up as a minus sign inside a circle.............
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That's strange, I can see them when I look at the thread. I myself have difficulty seeing other peoples pics most of the time.
Sorry about that, I did just as the YouTube video showed. |
no pics
Yeah,
No pics for me either. |
Where are you hosting your pictures? If Google Photo, these instructions have always worked for me: http://www.vansairforce.com/communit...73&postcount=7
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Sorry fellas, not sure what's going on. I can see them on my personal and company computers, but not my iPad. That's why I don't like doing it from a web storage site and not directly from my computer. Oh, well.
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I'd guess a permissions issue with google.
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Congratulations on your purchase of a beautiful RV-8 and best wishes for many enjoyable years flying it! |
Wish me luck
OK, I tried using SmugMug as opposed to Google Photos, hope this works. My transition training was easier than this.
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I don't believe the previous owner had any tailwheel time at all, or very little. He and his father flew it to Calif, he mentioned to his wife his landings were scary and that did it for her. |
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