It is almost impossible to insure or to give away a piston-powered twin-engine airplane these days.\u00a0 The oft-stated rule is that, in the event of an engine failure, “the second engine takes you to the scene of the accident”.\u00a0 Engines tend to fail shortly after takeoff when the pilot is busy, the airplane is slow, and the ground is going to come rushing up if swift action is not taken to feather the propeller (feather = turn the propeller blades so that the edges face the wind and it doesn’t create a huge amount of drag on one wing).\u00a0 When an engine quits, the pilot is supposed to push up the two mixture controls, the two prop speed controls, the two throttles and then make sure that the gear and flaps are up.\u00a0 After that it is identify and verify the dead engine by pulling back the throttle and seeing that there isn’t any yaw.\u00a0 Finally one is supposed to pick the correct prop speed control from among the six power levers and pull it back to feather.\u00a0 I thought I’d done just this and was a bit surprised by the fact that the airplane was yawing as I pulled the lever back.\u00a0 I kept pulling.\u00a0 My instructor, Jim Henry, is normally the soul of cool and calm.\u00a0 He jumped out of his seat and pushed my hand out of the way.\u00a0 “Maybe you shouldn’t pull back the mixture on the good engine.”<\/p>\n
Ooops.\u00a0 One lever too far to the right.\u00a0 We were up at 3000′ above the ground, so there was no real hazard, but now I’ve learned why the average engine failure in a twin isn’t managed very well by the pilot.\u00a0 It really may be beyond the capabilities of the typical pilot.\u00a0 Turbine-powered airplanes, by and large, don’t ask pilots to be this good.\u00a0 On a King Air, a dead engine’s prop will feather itself and some rudder boost will be applied as well.\u00a0 On a turbojet, there isn’t a concept of feathering.<\/p>\n
I’m ready for my multi-engine instructor checkride, but I might be kidding myself if I said I was ready to handle a real engine failure shortly after takeoff in a piston twin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is almost impossible to insure or to give away a piston-powered twin-engine airplane these days.\u00a0 The oft-stated rule is that, in the event of an engine failure, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n