Friends have been asking me about Harrison Ford’s crash landing in Santa Monica. It isn’t too surprising that a vintage World War II airplane with a radial engine suffered an engine failure. Generally it is impossible to get a new or factory-rebuilt radial engine, so you’re relying on at least some parts that are more than 50 years old, albeit regularly inspected.
The Facebook buzz seems to be at least partly along the lines of “Why do they let rich idiots fly their own airplanes?” I.e., pretty much the opposite of the reaction that people had to the engine-out landing of Captain Sully and Jeff Skiles in their Airbus, despite the similar nature of the problem and the similar solution (“choose a reasonable place to land”). Ford’s engine failed at a much lower altitude so he had less time to think and plan.
Perhaps this will be a good marketing opportunity for the Chinese owners of Cirrus Aircraft!
[You might well ask why did the engine choose to quit immediately after takeoff? There are a disproportionate number of power failures in the few minutes before landing and in the 30 seconds or so after takeoff. The pre-landing failures are easy to explain: fuel planning was close but not quite right, thus leading to running out of gas with just a few minutes to go (of course, a conservative pilot would elect to make an unplanned fuel stop rather than push his or her luck). The post-takeoff failures have to do with the fact that airplane engines are run at 100 percent power while rolling down the runway and climbing up to 1000′ or so. This is when piston engines tend to come apart, rather than in cruise flight when 65-75 percent power is standard. Robinson figured this out and designed its helicopters so that the piston engines never run at more than 80 percent power at any time. This reduced the failure rate so much that a piston engine that is typically overhauled after 2000 airplane hours is recommended for overhaul at 2200 hours in a Robinson.]
Is the Cirrus parachute actually useful in an engine-fail-at-takeoff scenario?
J: Supposedly works as low as 400′ above the ground. (It would typically take 30-45 seconds to get to 400′ AGL.)
> This reduced the failure rate so much that a piston engine that is
> typically overhauled after 2000 airplane hours is recommended for
> overhaul at 2200 hours in a Robinson.
So this is only a 10% difference ? Is is really significant ?
jsc, the key in that sentence might be ‘recommended for overhaul’ vs ‘overhauled’, otherwise I’m just as confused as you are.
jsc, Aaron: It is significant because it can be harder for the average pilot to manage an engine failure in a helicopter than in an airplane. The airplane is already set up to glide, albeit perhaps not at the optimum speed, when the engine quits. The helicopter needs flight control inputs to be put into a glide, typically within just a few seconds after the engine failure. Other piston helicopters, such as Enstrom, can have a recommended overhaul interval at 1500 hours.
(And I should add that, even with the slightly longer TBO, the engine failure rate in Robinson R44s is substantially lower than the rate when the same engine is put into an airplane.)