Deadstick landing after losing propeller.

[red750]

This popped up on my Facebook courtesy Vintage Bonanzas Group.

 

 

 

[kaz3g]

The video had sound but I heard no calls. And I'm not sure what all the paddling with the stick was about.

 

But he got it on the strip without breaking it or hurting himself so deserves a big tick for that.

 

Kaz

 

 

[Head in the clouds]

I think he probably did make calls on the radio, from about 0:40 you can see him pressing the large red button on the control stick.

 

I'd say this was probably a a first 'glide' for him, lots of stress evident and considering that, he did quite well.

 

Something worth noting for others that might find themselves in a similar predicament - in any engine failure there's always a strong urge to get on the ground as quickly as possible and get the whole nightmare over and done with. However that's not the best way to go about it. OK, he had an airstrip right there but trying to get down quickly will usually reduce your options for places to make an outlanding, and very much reduce your thinking time.

 

Establishing yourself on best L/D glide speed with appropriate adjustments of that, a little faster for penetration into wind or a little slower to benefit from being carried further if gliding downwind, provides you with a much larger area, and much more time to think out the landing, than simply pointing the nose groundwards.

 

Also - you don't want to break the airframe - have a look at this fella's airspeed when he selects flap for landing, he's about 20kts over the white band, in some aircraft that's enough to tear a flap off.

 

He really didn't believe the prop was gone did he? Giving it several bursts of power on the way down as if it might miraculously have fixed itself - and I love the last bit of the video where he walks around the front and stares incredulously at the blank space where the airscrew used to be ...

 

Overall though, great to see the situation managed successfully. As Kaz said, everyone deserves a big tick for that.

 

 

[ozbear]

Good job I wonder if he ever found the prop and what failed shaft or bolts I'm guessing it's a 912 rotax

 

 

[Yenn]

Not the least of his worries would be the change of C of G. To lose the weight of the prop is a fairly big moment change. Not so bad with some of the pusher types, but for a tractor prop it could be more than the elevators could handle.

 

 

[Head in the clouds]

Not the least of his worries would be the change of C of G. To lose the weight of the prop is a fairly big moment change. Not so bad with some of the pusher types, but for a tractor prop it could be more than the elevators could handle.

You can see it's a timber prop, weight would be about 2kg. At that approx 2m distance from the CG, the aft movement of the CG would be about 1-2%, I don't think he'd have noticed it, certainly in the event it wasn't enough to slow his glide down anyway ...

 

Years ago, flying a very minimum aircraft a bit like a lightweight version of a Jackeroo, I lost most of a timber prop and then the engine shook itself off its mounts and the only thing that kept it onboard was the throttle cable and a swaged cable I'd put around the mounts in case of just such an event - it was the fashion back then, learnt from drag and sprint cars that chained their engines to the chassis in case the mounts let go, so the engine couldn't separate and go into the crowd.

 

And - having learnt from a friend who had a similar occurrence a couple of days earlier - he had grabbed the engine which was hanging by only the throttle cable and pulled it onto his lap and the exhaust pipe burnt the hell out of his legs, he pulled the throttle cable out of it's quadrant in the process - I already have enough previous burns so I didn't do that - instead I braced the engine forward with one foot to get it out of my face. That made rudder use difficult but I got down OK onto the massive airfield directly below. Fun days!

 

The point is - my friend had the option of throwing the engine away but didn't want to lose control through CG change and neither did I but neither of us noticed any major change in controllability even with the entire engine moved back about a metre. Any problem would have come if we'd actually allowed a stall to develop, then the recovery would have been more exciting than usual, I would think :-)

 

At Vne our LSA type elevators can/will produce a down or up force of approximately the MTOW of the aircraft, so a 600kg force way down the back will easily overcome a 2kg mass change a couple of metres forward of CG.

 

 

[Birdseye]

I love that auto-feathering.