It’s a feared area among pilots. The engine failure. What would you do if the engine quit on your 150, skyhawk, or archer? Airplane engine failure is one area we can’t practice enough. To help make matters easier we have the ABC’s of an emergency. Check out the video.
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Hi and welcome to MzeroA’s video podcast, episde 10, Inflight Emergencies: What to Do If the Engine Quits. I’m your host, Jason Schappert.
As a student pilot, you have plenty of opportunities to practice your simulated engine failures. It’s important to continue those practices even after you receive your private pilot certificate. However, I find most students find it easy to recite their emergency procedure on the ground but it’s more difficult to actualy perform them on the air. That’s why I developed the ABC’s of an emergency.
Let’s watch the video.
It’s the one thing you can never train enough for: the unexpected engine failure. Under the pressure of this situation, it’s easy to forget what exactly to do. This is why we’ve developed the ABC’s of an emergency:
A, in our acronym, is for airspeed. We need to pitch and maintain that best glide speed to keep us aloft as long as possible.
The B in our acronym stands for the best landing area. Keep in mind that area might be behind you or below you. In our case, it’s off our left wing, we have a grass strip. It’s important to start heading towards that area and to stay committed to that field.
The C in our acronym is for checklist. Now, this of course is situation permitting. If you are at 800 feet and you have an engine failure, you don’t have the time to complete a checklist. However, in our case, we’re at 2000 feet. We have plenty of time. Our emergency checklist consists of our fuel selector valves on Both, our mixtures rich, carb heat’s on, our magnetos are on, our primers in and locked and we attempt a restart. Assuming our engine does not restart, we go ahead and squawk 7700, and we’re also going to give a mayday call on 121.50.
One of the best ways to improve your simulated emergency landings is to treat it like it’s a normal landing. As you notice, we entered on a left downwind and now we’re flying a left base. Treat it just like a normal traffic pattern where we practice our power-off 180’s or our power-off landings.
You don’t want to add flaps until you know you have the field made. If you notice here, it’s looks like we’re a little bit high so we add in flaps to make sure we’re not going to be too fast or too high and overshoot the field in front of us. Now, in this simulation, we’ll actually be landing. However, there’s no quicker way to bust your check ride than on your simulated engine-out dropping below 500 feet AGL. You’ll have to do a go around or recovery by 500 feet AGL. I recommend going around even sooner, maybe 600 feet.
As we bring it down the home stretch, we want to verify that our seatbelts are snug and tight, our seats are locked, and we also want to slightly crack the doors in the event the airplane flips, we would still be able to open the doors to get out.
With a safe touchdown, we call it a day. Hopefully this lesson will make you a safer pilot and answer your questions about you had about emergency procedures.
Remember, a good pilot is always learning. See ya!
