by David Gagliardi, Transport Canada Inspector, Flight Operations
Every private pilot student is familiar with the forced landing exercise. The airplane is out in the practice area, the instructor reaches over and pulls the throttle to idle, and they tell you the engine just failed. You then frantically look around for a field to land in, quickly mumble the engine failure checks and concentrate on flying a gliding approach that will hopefully set you up for a landing in the field. The first few times you probably missed the field by a country mile, but with a bit of practice, you get better at flying an approach that would actually result in a good score on the flight test.
However, let’s look at the lesson we are really teaching. What we are showing the student is that the aircraft for which they had done a full walkaround inspection (including draining the fuel sumps, checking the fuel and oil levels, performing all the run-up checks, verifying the correct static RPM/MP at the beginning of the takeoff roll, and which in cruise flight displayed normal engine gauge indications) had a sudden and complete engine failure. This type of engine failure scenario is, in fact, the least likely to actually occur in the real world.
The reality is that the accident statistics show that at least 60% of the engine failures are a direct result of the actions or inactions of the pilot. Carb ice and fuel exhaustion/mismanagement figure most frequently in the cause of the failure, and both, of course, are entirely preventable by the pilot.
An accident report I once read is sadly a typical example of this phenomena. The aircraft lost all power, and the pilot executed a difficult but successful forced landing into a very small field: the only available flattish area within gliding range. The airplane was totalled, but nobody was hurt. The pilot attributed his success to surviving the engine failure on the fact that he regularly practiced forced landings. The cause of the accident: carb ice. It would seem to me that if this pilot spent more effort on developing an effective instrument scan and regularly checked for carb ice on a day that was particularly conducive to carb icing, he would not have had to use all that forced landing practice for real, and there would be one more general aviation airplane still flying.
This problem is exacerbated because, typically, every simulated engine failure during training results in a “no start.” We are therefore training the student that the engine will never restart after it fails. My practice is to restore power on some simulated engine failures, if the student performed an efficient and effective cause check.
A sad example of what happens when you condition the student to concentrate on flying the approach and don’t establish the importance of the cause check occurred to a pilot flying an airplane based at my home airport. The engine failed at 3 000 ft AGL. Again, a very well-flown approach into the only available spot, but a nasty little timber cut block resulted in no injures. However, it resulted in a wrecked airplane. When the airplane was recovered, it had 10 gallons of gas in the left tank and 0 gallons in the right tank, with the fuel selector set to the right tank. I wonder if more attention had been paid to the cause check in this pilot’s training that they would have found the problem and restored full power.
The last “engine failure” I personally experienced did not start out as an engine failure. The first hint that my day was about to be ruined was the RPM starting hunting 100 revs up and down. All of the appropriate troubleshooting was inconclusive. The situation progressed to intermittent burps where the engine momentarily lost power to a total loss of power just out of gliding range of the runway. Fortunately for me, I was able to recover power, and I made an uneventful landing on the runway, with the engine stopping when I pulled the power off on short final.
Despite over 40 years of flying experience, I found the situation very difficult to deal with because it wasn’t obvious what was wrong and if I could still get home if/when the engine failed. In the end, all I could do was assume the engine could fail at any time and arrange a flight path that always gave me a landable option. The incident records show that for every total engine failure, there are at least two incidences where a significant but not total power loss occurred, yet this scenario is seldom covered in training.
The problem is the traditional one for flight safety. You ace the forced landing. and you are a hero. However, if you do all the boring stuff like good walkarounds, make the effort to learn your airplane systems so you know what to look for during the run-up and, in flight, don’t “live with” aircraft defects, and have good checklist discipline. Your chance of having an engine failure is then greatly reduced, but you don’t get any credit for something that didn’t happen.
I think that the first step to breaking the engine failures caused by the pilot problem is to be honest about pilot failures and cover those during training. Habits, good or bad, are established in initial pilot training, and it is important for instructors to connect student mistakes in normal operations to potential consequences. When teaching or for those already licensed and practicing forced landings, after pointing the airplane at a suitable landing area, it is vital that a full and effective cause check is completed. If my student misses an item or rushes the check the exercise is over, I climb back up and reset the exercise. In addition, I give my students a few partial failures, some with enough power to just maintain level flight, and some with power but not enough to maintain level flight. This invariably generates some excellent discussion around the decisions the pilot made.
Engine mechanical failures almost always give some warning, so I insist that my students get a feel for where the engine gauges normally sit. Significant changes from normal will result in action by the pilot. However, that only works if pilots develop the habit of regularly scanning the instruments.
Finally, I tell my students that when the engine fails, the insurance company just bought the airplane. The only consideration is the safety of the occupants. If the airplane can be saved, that’s nice, but it should never be a consideration. If power can’t be restored, the pilot’s only responsibility is to fly the airplane to survivable landing areas and arrive with the airplane fully under their control.