This is an excerpt from a report made to the Aviation Safety Reporting System. The narrative is written by the pilot, rather than FAA or NTSB officials. To maintain anonymity, many details, such as aircraft model or airport, are often scrubbed from the reports.
Local flight at home field ended in an off-airport forced landing about five miles short of the intended landing runway.
Plan was to practice two GPS approach procedures. Single pilot, no hood, no safety pilot, totally VFR, just perform two GPS approach procedures to practice setting up and using the fairly new-to-me panel-mounted GPS in my Bonanza 35.
Planned about an hour flying, departed with slightly under half full tanks on both sides.
Finished the two approaches and decided to do one more short one without starting all the way to the initial fix, just to practice the descent on the GPS glide slope. Descending with gear down, the engine quit about five miles from the runway.
Saw immediately the selected left tank was empty. I had forgotten to switch tanks about half-way through the flight as intended. There was still just under half tank showing in the right tank.
Switched to the right tank promptly expecting an immediate restart, but the engine did not restart. Tried everything I could think of to try to restart the engine with no success.
Finally at about 500 feet AGL I landed in what appeared to be the smoothest desert terrain straight ahead. The landing was surprisingly uneventful and even the fairly short run after landing was surprisingly smooth. However the aircraft hit several cactus along the way.
Uninjured and surprisingly calm I inspected the aircraft and found medium size dents on the right wing and nose cowl, small dents on the side of the engine compartment and on the left wing and landing gear door. The tachometer showed 1.2 hours for the flight.
The FAA from the nearest FSDO inspected the aircraft the next day and recovery procedures are underway now two days after the event.
My mistakes were forgetting to switch tanks, departing with legal reserve but still minimal fuel, and possibly not thinking under pressure of everything I should have done to restart.
Regular practice of these procedures would be a very good idea, but hard to prioritize when you fly for hundreds or even thousands of hours without incident. Perhaps insisting on such practice at every flight review would be a good idea.
Primary Problem: Human Factors
ACN: 1961071
Gas
Undercarriage
Mixture
Prop.
When the Continental coastal grow fuel in ejection stops for no fuel the engine driven pump just sucks air.
Switch tank and turn the electric pump on. The engine should restart in 10 seconds. One a Continental engine running both pumps will flood the engine. With Bendix injection the fuel is automatically adjusted. To the Lycoming engine on a Duke does the.
Every checklist I’ve seen. has fuel on fullest tank as first item.
I believe on the Bonanza that under those circumstances it’s necessary to turn on the boost pump. Some earlier models had a manual pump instead of the electric one.
Depending on altitude, trying to re-start a hot big bore engine is a waste of very little time.
Look at some of the hot start procedures. Some will take 90 seconds to go through.
“forgetting to switch tanks”. Yes – who doesn’t forget things. That automatically means that ‘remembering’ to switch tanks is not a good strategy. Use a timer, program a message in the GPS, include it on a nav/log, something. I believe Cessna lost at least one lawsuit because they didn’t have low-fuel warnings, which they added when production resumed in 1996. Include fuel on checklists. Monitor ALL systems regularly including fuel gauges. Just don’t rely solely on memory.
Why the engine not restart?
How do you land a 500’ AGL?
Yep, I noticed that too… However, lets give them the benefit of doubt.
During emergencies we are typically calm… only later do our minds race and hands shake at the close shave. At least I am, mostly. Writing about an experience can bring it vividly back to life… especially when errors could have been avoided. I don’t do my best writing after a vivid incident… Still fresh in my memory. This writer was, otherwise, fairly coherent compared other written narratives we’ve read.
Perhaps at 500′ AGL… the pilot COMITTED to land, IE: stop trying to re-start, and, while they still had useful altitude and airspeed… make a fully controlled descent-to-a-landing in the best-of-the-‘unknown terrain’. Indecision could have been a ‘killer’.
“Self-inflicted wounds hurt the worst.” –unknown
“Experience is a cruel teacher. First she gives you the test; then she teaches you the lesson.” – often cited version of Vern Law’s quote
I think he meant when he got to 500 AGL he had to commit to landing, and stop trying, or hoping the engine would restart.