[ARCHIVED THREAD] - In flight failures. (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 7/31/2008 7:42:43 PM EDT
| Had a nice flight today with the gf. maybe i'll post pictures if interested. Well, she got to experience a power off stall in the piper for the first time. I got to experience a vacuum pump failure right around the same time.... I was lucky that I was VFR. Anyone else experience any inflight failures of any sort? |
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All my excitement either was with weather (wind shear and ice) or other airplanes (That guy has blond mustache.) It's God way of telling you that you need to be doing partial panel work. Remember, when trying to maintain wings level with a wet compass only, the compass is most stable when flying south. Thus, you'll at least crash wings level, which is often the difference between getting fucked up and dying. |
| When I was a flight instructor I did have a couple vacuum pump failures (all VFR, our mechanic put the brand new ones in our instrument trainers and switched the older ones to our 152's) Had an alternator fail once and quite a few returns to the field while talking to tower on a cell phone. When you said inflight failures....do students trying to kill you count? |
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Let's see.... Total loss of hydraulics T2 Probe/FADEC failures Pressurization failure Electrical fire Leaking fuel tank Pitot static failures MFD failure FMS failures Engine Master Warning, which lead to a precautionary engine shutdown. At least 12+ bird-strikes... 5 lightning strikes too many things to count over a career....  |
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I had an artificial horizon die during a practice back course one evening. It just slowly rolled over to its dead bug positon, feet in the air. I was flying a 210 one afternoon shortly after a 100 hour inspection and the (unhooked) nose gear door started flapping and making a hell of a racket. The engine on my 170 stuck a valve or two abeam the Fort Atkinson, Wi airport one day enroute to Oshkosh. It's a long walk to town from that airport. The right engine in a 402 stopped making power one night enroute to Joplin. For a change, it didn't throw a rod or blow a cylinder off. Every flight in those airplanes was a flying failure. |
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Radio Failure in the pattern... Osan AB... C-172, single radio at the start of the flight... Transmit went out.... ATC Airman instructed to continue in the pattern and land, if I could hear him... I set the transponder for no-radio, and that was the last radio call I heard... Dipshit then proceeded to clear a 2nd aircraft on opposite base, setting up a mid-air collision....  Fortunately, we both saw each other and maneuvered to avoid..... When I get back down, it turns out that dumbass had 'reconsidered' his decision to have me land, cleared the other A/C (with 2 perfectly functioning radios and no emergency) to land in front of me, and then tried to light signal ME to circle... Real Air Force Genius, eh... Oh yeah, he tried to blame *ME* for all of the above... |
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Left engine failure on take-off- AeroCommander 680; no big deal Electrical fire in a T210 @ FL190 Gear extension failure in a C172RG- but no gear up landings, Thank God! ADF loop antenna broke and wrapped around the tail of a 182 I was flying. Engine failure in an Aeronca Champ, resulting in off field landing. Front engine failure in a C337 Mixmaster while on base. Fuel selector valve broke when I switched tanks on downwind. Too many radio failures to remember. Vacuum pump died while in IMC. Partial panel practice paid off in that case and thankfully it was soft IMC! Runaway prop in my old Aztec- that was bit exciting. |
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Yep. Landing gear on an Arrow; Engine on a Seneca; Stickshaker engaging in a HS125-400 at 36K feet, while not even remotely close to stalling; Autopilot violently porpoising aircraft at 35K feet, in same HS125-400. GNS-XLS showing "GPS LINK FAIL", and dropping off line. Let's just say our paper charts didn't come out to be of the area we were in. Let's just say that Miami Center was very nice and vectored us in... (Citation II, prebuy inspection flight) Multiple pressurization failures. And a multitude of electronic component and instrument failures. |
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CFI days a vaccum failure night IFR. Couple of chip lights but no problems at Mother Rucker. A electrical short in a T-41 antique the State of Texa insisted on keeping. Had to pump the gear on a Pa-23. Not me but a fellow CFI had a rear window break in flight. (might have something to do with doing a loop with a student- with a un-secured briefcase in the back seat) Ken
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I sucked a rear side window out of my Decathlon when I was learning slow rolls. Neither window was installed correctly, but still ... After the new window was installed and the opposite window R&R'd, the problem never occurred again, and a raft of students went through that airplane. |
Damn, that must be one of them amatuer, homebuilt built CJ's 
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I hope you briefed the gf on what exactly a power off stall is, that it isn't the engine stalling, what was gonna happen, how you would fix it, etc etc etc.......... [/rant] As to failures: More lightning strikes that I could count. More stuck start valves in JT8s (727) than I could count, all resulting in me manually opening the valve. Usually standing on a cookie sheet held up by a forklift in Haiti. 1 engine shut down at altitude in a 727. 1 engine "high vibes" which resulted in shutdown in an L-1011 at, umm, well right between "positive rate" and "gear up." Standby horizon failed on my very first trip after being released to the line as captain on the 737. Nose landing gear on an Arrow. |
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Something screwy happened the carburettor on the 172 during my third or fourth lesson. Lost all power, the 'engine would about idle during climbout. Instructor took over, did a tailwind landing on the same runway. Wonderfully reassuring start to my aviation career. NTM |
I wasnt PIC, but I was on the controls when the headgasket cracked in my friends '41 Aeronca TL.....sudden loss of RPMs equals a pucker factor of 10!  Also a couple months ago when landing I was in the rear seat and not on the controls, the tailwheel spring broke and the tailwheel then jammed up into the rudder......why cant I move the rudder on the ground?.....why am I slowing down faster than normal, cant steer, and am drifing off into the tall grass?
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As a guy that had to fly a -700 my hats off to ya..The -400 was an emergency sitting on the ramp 
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Agreed. Guaranteed avionics work whenever it landed. Both 400 and 700 we maintained were job security with a tailnumber. |
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Mild compressor stall on a PT6 Electronic Engine Control Failure (dramatic, but just the Brasilia making sure you're still awake) Gear unsafe indication (it was down and locked) Uncommanded rudder boost Electrical smoke (just a bad resistor) Environmental smoke xEleventy billion (a batch of bad pack fans) Rolled a tire off the rim in the snow Killed a deer Trivial stuff, engine gauge failures, cabin panels falling on pax heads, and the like. And then all manner of faults and problems encountered on the ground. An uncontained engine failure tomorrow would actually gratify some deep twisted part of me. Like the arsonist-fireman, or something. |
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Several, bust most notable: Took off in a Commander 114 on a short IFR hop in the DFW Terminal Area. Picked up my IFR in the air, leveled off and shortly thereafter had a total electrical failure. No comms, no navs, in the soup. Fished the portable GPS out of the flight bag. Finally got it booted up and "direct to" entered. A quick "flash" of the "direct to" arrow and the whole thing went Tango Uniform. Dead batteries. Got lucky, found a hole and made it in after an alternate gear extension and no flaps. A wire from the alternator to the battery had come loose on the T/O roll and quit charging the battery, which went unnoticed by me. Lesson learned. First flight right out of Flight Safety initial type in the Embraer Brasilia. Leveled off in cruise and enoying the view out those big direct view side windows and the hum from those big Pratt's when I noticed the #1 oil temp inching up above the red line. Now we have annunciators for nearly every single system on this thing, except, you guessed it, the oil temps. Declared an emergency and shut it down. First landing ever and it was single engine. Oh yea, and Sheppard AFB tower (joint use) wanted me to make a 360 on a 1 1/2 final to get some nuggets out on a training mission. Thanks, but no thanks. Unable. Nice. |
| Military i've had many failures in flight, but its a Chinook, no biggie. In the Cessna, blew an interior oil line in flight, ruined a rug, good thing for the restrictor. Had a brake line blow, and did a short field landing with it, not too hairy. Few radio failures, and a shimmy damper drained out and when i landed it shimmied so hard it blew the front wheel pant off. |
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Had a nasty engine hiccup once that made my cheeks clench, as I had my son (1 year old at the time) in the plane. Other than that, just an autopilot failure but it was easy to detect. It was about 2am over Western Nebraska and I really wasn't in the mood to be hand flying though. Oh, and a landing light failure but that was no big deal. |
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I was a student and flying VFR in a 172. Climbing to 4000 feet and failed to apply carb heat......CFI pulled power and made me sweat it out, made me recognize the problem and the restart failed, found an alternate field, applied flaps, did everything but declare an emergency, he made me tell him what I would say to the tower. We got about 800 feet off the ground and applied power. I will never, ever, ever forget to apply the carb heat again. This sadly was right before September 11th. Didn't return due to other commitments. |
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Oh, forgot. Had the pilot's side window break around the vent window in a Seneca II. Because of the way the break ran, booking along at 12K feet the whole window started to get sucked right out of the frame. As my copilot was stowing charts and GPS and other loose items, I did a "rapid decent" to 4K feet and slowed way down. That flight turned into the longest flight ever. |
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Not much for me... Had a yellow Oil pressure gauge on my big solo cross country for a good hour...if it'd of inched one notch up I'd of declared an emergency... Also had an attitude indicator fail on me during a night flight...that was fun. Thankfully we were doing work near the airport, so it was an easy land with an instructor in the right seat. Both were as a Student Pilot based out of UND in Grand Forks, ND. |
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Man, I had a bad one tonight. On start up we had a hydraulic failure on the number 2 pump, then we had to reject two different takeoffs, once for an engine failure and the second time for a stick shaker going off around 100 kts. THEN, the weather where we were kept getting super crappy and we had to go around several times because the weather was too low. THEN, one time we can actually see the runway to land and another plane pulled out onto the runway. It seemed like every time we went around we had an engine quit or catch fire. Oh, and to top it all off, the flaps failed on the last approach and we had to do a flaps up landing. Man, what a bad night........ |
ATA? |
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Was that a shot??? It felt like a shot......  Actually, it was my HS-125 type ride. |
Thats why we're Mechanics |
That explains it. I'm not surprised... |
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Too many to list from hauling checks for a really low end charter company. A few that really got my attention (and a little seat cover) were: A-Electrical smoke in the cockpit after going missed at CLT and it was down to mins at the alternate B-Stick puller actuating on rotation, 40 degrees nose up.....Smartass usair pilot keyed up the mike and called me a showoff C-Loss of cabin pressure at 39000ft and a comm loss at the same time Hey, if it was always Calm, 10 miles vis, clear, and nothing ever broke it would be the most boring job in the world. It keeps it interesting.  |
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c-152 powerplant failure where i landed on an intersecting taxiway. a piece of the engine was sticking through the cowl. numerous radio and gauge failures. instrument rated and i will never trust a vacuum or electrical powered instrument. when i was learning i filled out the squawk sheet after every flight. there is a reason the 747 is triple redundant. c210 nose gear wouldn't cycle down. learned to pump the gear down over the local lake while the tower was getting the emergency crews together. eventually got 3 green lights. several bird strikes. blow out on roll out. |