The private pilot was conducting a cross-country flight at a cruise altitude of 5,000′ mean sea level (msl) in day visual meteorological conditions when the Beech A36 experienced a total loss of engine power.
Over the next minute, the plane continued a northerly track before it began a turn to the west as the controller identified the closest public airport, private strip, state highway, and open areas for potential forced landing sites, which the pilot acknowledged.
About three minutes later, the plane hit trees and terrain near Dadeville, Alabama, and was consumed by post-crash fire, killing both people on board.
All engine accessories were destroyed by fire and could not be examined except for the engine-driven fuel pump, which revealed no anomalies.
The engine displayed internal and external thermal damage, but internally displayed signatures consistent with normal wear and lubrication. Tree damage at the site was consistent with a rotating propeller at the time of tree contact.
An NTSB performance specialist plotted potential glide ranges and trajectories for the airplane from the assumed point of engine power loss. About the time of the loss of engine power, the airplane was about one mile abeam an abandoned airport. This airport was not plotted on the visual flight rules sectional chart nor was it visible to the controller, and it may not have been readily visible to the pilot due to its location on the right side of the airplane.
However, the airplane’s projected glide distance and trajectories indicated that the airplane was within gliding distance of numerous open fields, as well as a four-lane divided highway with a large grass median. It could not be determined why the pilot chose to forgo any of the potential suitable forced landing sites.
Probable cause: A loss of engine power for reasons that could not be determined due to postcrash thermal damage to the engine accessories and the airframe. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to navigate to any of the available forced landing sites within gliding distance of the airplane following the loss of engine power.
NTSB Identification: ERA17FA140
This March 2017 accident report is provided by the National Transportation Safety Board. Published as an educational tool, it is intended to help pilots learn from the misfortunes of others.
Mystery it is. At the very least, every other year, we’re sitting with an instructor that expects a high standard of emergency landing procedures to be demonstrated down to about 200-300ft in some cases. Based on the limited facts presented, it would appear that the three main challenges is in choosing the right field, identifying an achievable circuit and then attaining the desired final for a predictable power-off descent. Unless control issues were also present, it’s quite likely that there was a ‘plan’ that was difficult to realise possibly because of too much reliance on instinct and hope as opposed to the plan.
Personally, I don’t think we know exactly how we’re going to react if this scenario presented itself when we’re PIC. Even if we were above a 4000m hard runway, we would like to think that we would manage to do everything reasonably possible to ensure survival. I can’t help think that when I’m with an instructor, the one or two PFL’s can be subject to the Hawthorne Effect. I mean, do many pilots actually practice a relatively realistic PFL? Perhaps we could find a suitable training field that would enable us to practice a full PFL?
10,000+ hrs of GA instruction given, personally 3 off-field emergencies, 12 engine failures later, I ALWAYS taught my PP students one thing, emergency landings. To the point of boring them. And, Always, on their last long XC before their test ride, I ALWAYS arranged for them to be directly over Lincoln Airport, Lincoln, CA, at 6,000′ or higher. (Lincoln is close to sea level.)
Then I would pull the power, and tell them, “EMERGENCY!” “Ah, DAMN, Taylor, we been through this a dozen times already!” “I’m Tired, let’s just go home!” “Nope, you got an emergency. handle it. ” They would boringly go thru all the procedures, —no joy– set up for an emergency landing over the biggest, most boring “emergency landing field” in the world. (Lincoln is an old military triangular field with about a dozen different landing possibilities).
Then I would reach over, pull the mixture full lean, and slow the airplane down to almost stall. The prop would slowly stop. (you’d be amazed at how difficult it is to get the prop to stop)
All the sudden I had their full attention again!
And, seven-eight minutes later, when they STILL were at about 3,000 feet in a plane with an engine with a stopped prop, they get this joyous look on their faces when they realize that, just because the engine TOTALLY STOPPED, they were still alive, and were again, BORED!
I had four very definite checkpoints on this descent, where I always made a conscious decision whether to continue the prop-stopped flight, but with only one exception, the students made a full landing to a stop with the prop stopped.
Many years later, I have had a couple of my students over the years have to make emergency landings. They both came back to me and said when it happened, I was sitting right there in the cockpit with them, making sure they did the right things.
That’s why I have always been an instructor. When My instructor cut the back out of my shirt when I soloed at 16, he told me,—–“All this time I have been teaching you to fly, I’ve had hold of your shirttail keeping you from killing us.” :”Well, you’re soloed now, but buddy, you just remember, I’VE STILL GOT HOLD OF YOUR SHIRTTAIL!” “EVERY TIME YOU START TO SCREW UP, YOU”RE GONNA FEEL ME YANKING.” “pay attention!”
He yanked on my shirttail many times in the last 60 years, and my students have told me several times that they have felt me yanking, too.
Lee Taylor, [email protected]
Engine trouble? Immediate search for landing spot. Second? Which way the wind is blowing. To land against the wind. Then attempt restart. Then concentrate, no panic.
Been there. Done that. Still breathing, ,,
It appears that the pilot recognized the problem but was not looking outside the aircraft to sort out the best landing spot. The passenger was of no help to the pilot either. It also appears the there was ample fuel on board at the time of engine power loss.
Maybe fuel contamination, or flow problem.
The landing was required because of the engine failure.
An accident does not occur until landing. It’s obvious the pilot made some sort of error.
We need to quit calling engine failure the cause of accidents but start teaching pilots how to make off-field landings
This NTSB reads to me like the pilot was focused on diagnosing the problem and not on landing.
RIP.
I had an incident, once, with several equipment failures after departure in IFR conditions. We had a new equipment with which we haven’t been as familiar as we had thought. That equipment had previously caused several problems due to faulty wiring, so we thought it was another avionics problem. I decided to return to the airport from which we had departed just a couple of minutes before and not make a distracting search for the cause of our problem. The only still working flight display was on my panel side. Crew coordination was restricted because radio communication was possible only from my side, too. Radio volume was very faint so that each time we tried to talk to each others on intercom I could no longer hear ATC.
I had a lot of flying hours in that aircraft but my co-pilot was not very experienced.
As it turned out, later, it was a simple electrical problem. We had kicked generators off-line during a quick check and failed to reset them. I am sure I would have solved that problem in no time in a stress free classroom. I must have even known that it was an electrical problem somewhere in the depth of my brain but in flight I was so overloaded that I’ve never been able to “step back” and look at the whole picture.
We landed safely, but now I understand how people fail to see a putatively easy solution in a stressful situation.
Nothing like a complete mystery in an aviation fatality to start your morning.