38 replies to this topic

[rick1128]

CJ Eliassen, on 30 October 2003 - 09:10, said:

<font color='#000000'>I read this article and I am curious what you all would have done in the same situation.

As I was talking my student through this panel check, I pointed out how quickly the rotor RPM increased back to a safe value. Then I noticed something odd in the lower corner of the panel: The oil pressure gauge was at zero. As my mechanic mind was wondering why, I looked up at the engine tachometer. It was also at zero.

"OK, the engine has quit! This will be a real one. I've got the aircraft."

Just before reaching flare height, and feeling mighty close to those wires in my left, the student and I spotted something startling in the windscreen: WIRES!!!


Even when it doesn't look possible, don't give up -- fly your aircraft all the way to the crash. Thirty years ago, Bob Hoover told an interviewer that he always flew right into the crash -- and he has certainly crashed his share of airplanes. This is the second time in my flying career that Hoover's advice was a lifesaver. Thank you again, Bob.

Wires

Wires are invisible from most angles. If you talk to pilots who have had wire strikes and lived to tell about it (helicopters are particularly vulnerable since we fly low so often), they will often tell you that they were actively looking for wires -- and never saw them before the strike!</font>

First of all Kudos to this guy for keeping it all together.

As for moving the helicopter, since there were no tell tale signs of an engine failure, no bangs, grinding noises and the like, it was most likely a fuel or air interruption. Even turbines will tell you when things go wrong. After you land if you also see no other signs of issues, like a big puddle of oil under the engine or smoke, etc. I would start the engine and see what gives. If it starts and everything is normal, I see nothing wrong with moving the helicopter doing it the way he did it. It is called experience.

As for the CFI taking the controls. If I am going to be dinged for balling up a helicopter, I want my hands on the controls. Keep in mind, the student is flying on the instructor's certificate, so if anything happens, the instructor gets it. Personally, I would do the same thing and I don't care what anyone says.

Having meet Bob Hoover and talked with him many times, he is the model of the prefect gentleman. He has been pushing the envelope since the early 1940's. He has given many a young airman excellent advise and tips. Another example would be the crew of the United DC10 in Sioux City, IA. That should have been a 100% fatal accident. However, a large portion of the passengers survived. They survived because the crew kept working the airplane til everything came to complete stop and the dust settled.

As for looking for the wires, I took the 'Flying in the Wire Environment' course at HeliExpo a couple of years ago. The problem with looking for wires, is that you generally will not see them until it is too late, as we see in this event. You are better off looking for signs of wires. One of the signs happens to be roads. Roads generally have wires on or near them. Not always, but enough to make you leery of them. You still have to keep looking for wires as sometimes they will present you with a gotcha. A case in point was a BH206 pilot doing a fish and game survey, hit a abandon cable-way across a river. The clearing had become overgrown and he didn't see the cable until the last second.

If you have a chance, you really need to look at taking that class. I used to do a powerline patrol and thought I had a reasonable handle on flying around wires. It opened my eyes.

[r22butters]

Quote

I see nothing wrong with moving the helicopter doing it the way he did it. It is called experience.

Well, in my "experience", if an engine does something its not supposed to do, I don't fly it again until a mechanic checks it out, and says its airworthy!

That's why, when the particular helicopter to which I'm refering stalled, I was not on board! It happened over the taxiway, so the "experienced" pilots on board (who chose to ignore my thoughts as to what was wrong (I mean what did I know, I was only the pilot at the controls, the first time around )), didn't get hurt.

So,...you "experienced" guys are more than welcome to fly it home (before it gets checked out by a mechanic). As for me,...I'm calling a cab!

[Wally]

r22butters, on 30 June 2011 - 13:40, said:

Well, in my "experience", if an engine does something its not supposed to do, I don't fly it again until a mechanic checks it out, and says its airworthy!

That's why, when the particular helicopter to which I'm refering stalled, I was not on board! It happened over the taxiway, so the "experienced" pilots on board (who chose to ignore my thoughts as to what was wrong (I mean what did I know, I was only the pilot at the controls, the first time around )), didn't get hurt.

So,...you "experienced" guys are more than welcome to fly it home (before it gets checked out by a mechanic). As for me,...I'm calling a cab!

Amen, Brother! Amen!
Part of the preflight is an inspection of maintenance records. An open issue stops the whole process there and then. An engine failure, or failure of any system that puts it in the dirt, is going to require that trained maintenance professionals identify and fix the issue before I fly. Period. An honest and capable mechanic's signature is life insurance of the best kind- you collect, alive.

[rick1128]

EYW-MIA, on 01 July 2011 - 05:46, said:

This is coming from someone who works on aircraft for about 11 years now. If you have an engine failure DO NOT Fly!. Yes the clutch disengaged from the main rotor. Yeaaa. But when He took off the engine could of seized up and then he would of been a rock falling out of the sky. If a mech. just keeps tweaking a problem STOP flying in their ships. Your life and any one else's in ship is at risk. Leave the school find a new one that follows FAA regulations and cares about peoples lives! You can do what you want but this is coming out of a mech. mouth. The last thing a pilot needs is the FAA asking if you know the mech had only tweaked the problem to sign the ship off so its operational and if you say yes your at fault for taking the unsafe ship off the deck. Please think about your passengers and your own life. You are responsible for every ones safety even the people on the ground that have nothing to do with you.

Let me put my comments into a better perspective. I have been flying commercially for well over 30 years. In that time I have had 8 engine failure events. All but one of them told me in advance of quitting that they were failing. The one exception was a turbine at idle power. When I pushed the power up, nothing happened. I was high enough to do a restart and everything was fine. It is not unknown for aircraft engines to quit at low idle due to an air or fuel interruption. Piston airplanes generally don't as they have a flywheel out front keeping the engine turning, so all that pilot will see is a slight hesitation. Jets and helicopters don't have that sort of flywheel effect so you can see the engine stop running. After landing, I did a couple of starts and run ups and then I talked with the DM and we were both of the consensus that it was an air interruption.

As for this pilot, he checked the oil and fuel level and had a sufficient amount of both, there were no signs of abnormal oil contamination and there was no fuel contamination. He started it up and it ran properly with no indications of engine abnormalities on the instruments. If there was a mechanical issue with the engine, by this time there would have been some indication of a problem. He made a judgement call based on his experience and his knowledge of that particular aircraft. I am not going to second guess him on this judgement call because I was not there and have not talked directly with him.

As for mechanics tweaking things. Especially when you are talking about carbs or fuel control units on fuel injection systems, many times all it takes is a tweak. A click or two this way or that. Properly setting a FCU or carb is sometimes more of an art than a skill. Besides, if this was an on going problem with this particular helicopter, why weren't all the instructors not jumping on maintenance and management about this? Many of times I have run across CFI's complaining about a particular aircraft, but they have never talked with maintenance or the Chief CFI about it. Why? The usual excuses I have heard are: 'They already know about it', One of the other instructors complained about it' and so on. Keep in mind what wheel gets the grease. Hint: it is not the quiet wheel.

[EYW-MIA]

This is coming from someone who works on aircraft for about 11 years now. If you have an engine failure DO NOT Fly!. Yes the clutch disengaged from the main rotor. Yeaaa. But when He took off the engine could of seized up and then he would of been a rock falling out of the sky. If a mech. just keeps tweaking a problem STOP flying in their ships. Your life and any one else's in ship is at risk. Leave the school find a new one that follows FAA regulations and cares about peoples lives! You can do what you want but this is coming out of a mech. mouth. The last thing a pilot needs is the FAA asking if you know the mech had only tweaked the problem to sign the ship off so its operational and if you say yes your at fault for taking the unsafe ship off the deck. Please think about your passengers and your own life. You are responsible for every ones safety even the people on the ground that have nothing to do with you.

I hit the wrong button, I went to edit and hit the delete sorry.

[EYW-MIA]

rick1128, on 01 July 2011 - 09:16, said:

Besides, if this was an on going problem with this particular helicopter, why weren't all the instructors not jumping on maintenance and management about this? Many of times I have run across CFI's complaining about a particular aircraft, but they have never talked with maintenance or the Chief CFI about it. Why? The usual excuses I have heard are: 'They already know about it', One of the other instructors complained about it' and so on. Keep in mind what wheel gets the grease. Hint: it is not the quiet wheel.

"Our maintenance facility says idle speeds and mixtures are properly adjusted, though they have tweaked them on several occasions".


See the way I took it from the story was that it was an on going problem with this ship. That is where I got my fuel from.

[rick1128]

EYW-MIA, on 01 July 2011 - 09:49, said:

"Our maintenance facility says idle speeds and mixtures are properly adjusted, though they have tweaked them on several occasions".


See the way I took it from the story was that it was an on going problem with this ship. That is where I got my fuel from.

EM,

From what I got out of the 1st post, it was a fairly new ship and the issue they were having was not happening to just this ship but a known quirk of all 300 when they are dealing with HIGH and HOT, and doing engine failure training. When dealing with hot temperatures, fuel injected engines can get a vapor lock in the FI system. Because of the prop, fuel injected airplanes generally only have an issue during a hot start as in flight, the prop is providing enough of a flywheel effect to prevent it during low power operations. It is not unknown for a piston airplane with a fuel injected engine to have the engine quit while sitting on the taxiway. From what it sounds like in the description, that is most likely what happened. Plus with the wide range of density altitudes they are dealing with, it is quite possible that maintenance is setting everything correctly, but a few degrees of temperature change and everything goes out the window.

[EYW-MIA]

Learn something new every day. Thank you sir.

Very respectively,
EWY

[Goldy]

Wow, cool to see an old FlingWing206 response....

[280fxColorado]

Vapor locking is very common on the fuel injected lycomings on hot days -- no matter how well they are maintained or "tweaked." Not much to do about it except understand it and expect it. Anything above 85 degrees and I expect to kill the engine at least some of the time while doing hover autos in the Schweizer. The Enstrom is even worse. With the turbo, it gets blazingly hot inside the engine compartment. This is why throttle chops are not recommended for autorotation entry -- especially not unannounced, and certainly not unless you are over terrain where you'd be comfortable taking it all the way in!

I was doing hover autos today with a student @ ~8,000 DA in the 280fx. We killed the engine twice in five attempts. I briefed the student on it beforehand, we expected it, and cranked the engine immediately after it quit before rotor rpm bled off too much for quick restarts. No big deal.

Last summer I was getting a student ready for an initial PPL checkride in 95 degree weather, nearly 10,000ft DA. I demo'd the first two autos explaining that we would only gently roll throttle back to split the needles. No throttle chops for risk of killing the engine. He did the first few beautifully. On the 4th one, I was rambling on in instructor mode about his "really smooth entry" when I notice things were awfully quiet. Looked down at the tach and noticed engine RPM was at Zero! Whooops, "MY controls!" Fortunately we were set up perfectly with a brisk headwind and straight in to a runway. We landed smoothly without issue, love the Enstrom high inertia! The student admitted he did accidentally chop the throttle fully closed. We got out, did a thorough a walk around, and called the mechanic who verified our suspicion. Started up the helo like normal, did a few extra engine checks on the ground, hovered for five minutes, practiced a few throttle chop hover autos, agreed all systems normal, and flew away.

I don't think there's anything unreasonable about MMC's decision to fly away after an engine failure from a known condition. As he said, he "failed" the engine because of the throttle chop. It wasn't something completely unexpected or inexplicable. The choice of location for the throttle chop, that's another story. An A&P cert doesn't give you xray vision and a magic wand. A little bit of common sense and understanding of systems goes a long way...

[Wally]

There may be some defense in continuing to fly an aircraft after faulty pilot technique has stopped the engine. I'd have to be absolutely convinced that that was the case.
An unanticipated, spontaneous engine stoppage aside from pilot induced stoppages- is an absolute end of day until maintenance has identified and fixed the specific cause of the power failure. A pilot can't release an aircraft to service after a maintenance issue, which a forced landing due to systems failure definitely is.

Edited by Wally, 03 July 2011 - 07:47.

[rick1128]

Yesterday, I did a flight in a 300 for the first time in a year and a half, so I did a quick study of the RFM. And I found a interesting comment in the RFM for both the C and CB. They are both setup as WARNINGS.

300C

WARNING

AVOID THROTTLE CHOPS TO FULL IDLE AT ALTITUDES ABOVE 7000 FEET,
TO AVOID POSSIBILITY OF ENGINE STOPPAGE.

300CB

WARNING
AVOID THROTTLE CHOPS TO FULL IDLE ABOVE 3750 FEET DENSITY ALTITUDE,
TO AVOID POSSIBILITY OF ENGINE STOPPAGE.

I wonder how many of the CFI's flying these helicopters are fully aware of these warnings?

[Mungo5]

There was a very unfortunate accident in MA, just over a year ago, on a very high and hot day.

A CFI checkride ended fatally for the FAA examiner after the engine on a 300CBi failed during a practice auto. Although the NTSB are still deliberating the prelim report does suggest the engine stopped after the throttle was chopped, and couldn't be restarted.

Sad to say they didn't quite make their spot and ended up in the trees.

[500F]

You guys have pretty much said it all, but I will add that a couple years ago a airplane landed hard during a instructional flight and the engine quit on impact. After loking it over the CFI took off and didnt clear the trees/powerlines at the end of the runway and died. Have a mech. check it out.

[heli3544]

Who cares where he did the throttle chop... That's the point of it all...Surprise. You cant pick where your engine fails... In my eyes good job!

[aeroscout]

heli3544, on 11 January 2012 - 12:11, said:

Who cares where he did the throttle chop... That's the point of it all...Surprise. You cant pick where your engine fails... In my eyes good job!

Whomever is doing the chopping should be quite certain a suitable landing area is easily within glide distance.

[HeloJunkie]

r22butters, on 28 June 2011 - 20:40, said:

Its generally "standard procedure" for the CFI to take the controls if the "sh*t really hits the fan",...no matter how experienced the student is!

Not to mention had he let the student attempt the auto and it had gone wrong, the FAA might have something to say about his decision making skills as an instructor!

[Trans Lift]

I had the engine quit in a 300C upon entry into an auto. It was very hot, not so humid but we were nowhere near the 7000ft limit. It can happen at any altitude on a hot/humid day. I was set up for a runway so there was no issue with making a spot and we landed fine. I also did not reduce to idle either, I was told not to snap the throttle but to reduce the power as you lower the collective.

It has happened multiple times to people I know at Bristow on those hot Florida days at sea level too.

Always have a place to go. Your student might be surprised but you should not be!

[HeloJunkie]

As a side note I know of a local operator that just lost a 300 (no one hurt) as a result of the exact same thing.

As the story goes - Instructor snapped the throttle closed, student enters auto, about 200' AGL instructor notices no engine, takes helicopter from student but in this case totally destroys the helicopter at the bottom of the auto. Both instructor and student walked away. This Time.

300 destroyed, student no longer a student and instructor no longer an instructor. Bad all the way around, but at least no one dead!