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by aspaceman
1639 days ago
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Could anyone who is a pilot comment on what you're _supposed_ to do if your engine completely goes out? From what I've read so far the answer is "keep trying to get the engine back". Do you just try and glide it out and land? That's what I would imagine. What even would be the situation where you would bail? Bailing sounds like more of a military thing to me. _Or_ a fire? |
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1. Fly: Trim the airplane for best glide speed (that is the speed that will let you travel the farthest before hitting the ground), which is a value you should have memorized. And don't forget to keep minding the stick and rudder - any unnecessary turns or aileron/rudder miscoordination costs you energy, and that means less time and less distance.
2. Find: Find the best place to put down the plane, and start maneuvering there. A road. A field. A river bed. Or even an airport; at cruising altitude there's one in gliding distance more often than you might think.
3. Fix: Try to get the engine running again. The engine can fail in a way the pilot is hopeless to get it running again, but more often by adjusting the throttle or mixture you'll be able to get it started again (it might have even been mismanagement of those things that caused it to fail - I accidentally turned the fuel off once).
Note that "call mayday" isn't even on that list. Its not like ATC is going to run out and catch you. While on a cross country VFR flight, you ought to have the radio tuned to a center controller, and have flight following so they know which blip on the radar is you. And if you don't do that, you ought to have the radio tuned to guard (the emergency frequency). And then when the "fix" step isn't working out, I would make a quick "MAYDAY MAYDAY MADAY, Center, $CALLSIGN, has an engine out, one on board, forced landing in a river bed to my east." But many people don't do any of those things. And for most of the airspace out there, you're not even required to have a radio, and planes of that vintage often don't.
And while lots of that video is fishy, I'm not reading much into his lack of communication. If I happened to be an experienced skydiver wearing a parachute, and my radio wasn't already tuned to a frequency where someone would be listening, in a panic I might skip talking to anybody in favor of getting out of the airplane while I still had enough altitude to safely deploy the chute.