Accident Review A36 Bonanza Engine Failure at Night

[Music] imagine having your engine quit on you during the descent to land well this would be bad enough during the day today's accident review is going to be one that happened at night so stick with us on flywire i think we might learn something [Music] hi i'm scott purdue today on flywire we're going to look at a recent 836 bonanza mishap that occurred at night unfortunately the pilot who was the only occupant was killed this accident happened just before 3 am on a friday morning it appears that the mishap bonanza was on an ifr flight from dixon municipal mike 02 to charles baker to mike 8 when the pilot requested a deviation slash diversion to mckellar sipes mkl which is in tennessee after he had already flown by the airport is when he requested this and some reports had the airplane on a vfr flight following uh but the cruise altitude going was at five and the coming back was at six thousand feet so that doesn't really fit very well with vfr standard westbound altitudes and at this time of the morning i don't think there was much traffic so i'm sure there was a correct hemispheric the pilot reported he had a fuel issue and needed to land it doesn't really appear that he declared an emergency actually there's no record of that uh and so far and the atc controller he provided a heading to mkl and then the mishap pilot turned left to the heading and began a descent he canceled this flight plan and then no further communication with the pilot occurred uh the atc controller issued an alert notice when the jets are flying by when the airplane dropped off radar short of the airport because he hadn't heard anything else later in the morning local law enforcement located the a36 about a mile and a half west of mkl in a wooded area the faa sent two inspectors out and they looked at the airplane the engine the cockpit and a portion of the right wing were separated from the rest of the aircraft and the right wing was severely damaged and the fuel tank was breached and that's kind of kind of an important point the fuel inlet line was checked and found not to have any fuel and there was a trace of fuel in the engine driven fuel pump inlet the left wing was intact and no fuel was found in the left wing here's an interesting thing that i've noted about fa inspectors they're great guys i'm not saying they're not but they're not accident investigators and from my direct observation after a couple of on-scene appearances with them the top item on their checklist is to see if the airplane ran out of gas and that's kind of it uh that's what they're interested in and that's what they did in this accident and it was the problem that caused the accident and the ntsb didn't travel to the scene they didn't go they did retain the wreckage however but i think this is unfortunate from my perspective the fa faa and the ntsb are virtually uninterested in figuring out the sequence of events with the view to preventing future accidents they're just interested in finding the proximate cause logging into the appropriate column and then closing the investigation they're busy they've got a lot of stuff to do granted i understand that like they have lots of accidents to look through and i understand that but that begs the question as to why you bother okay if there are no lessons learned from a mishap of this type what good does it do any of us any of the pilots so we can get better and learn from others mistakes i think to find these important lessons we need to take it upon ourselves as pilots interested in self-preservation and that's primarily why i'm doing these accident reviews uh kind of in the in the genre of grandpa petty bone from the navy google that one i wish there were some more facts here that determined that were to have been determined in this case so that we as pilots could have some factual basis to make decisions and recommendations on for sure this was operator error and the engine i quit from fuel starvation but that doesn't actually reveal anything useful knowing no useful information for the patterns left behind among other things you know i would like to know if the airplane had an engine monitor and if so what the download data revealed it could be very important i would like to know what tank the fuel selector valve was on okay that is a pretty important thing too no information about that and typically not captured so given the basic facts of this mishap what are the links in the chain that led to that dark and scary night well it turns out excuse me that this mishap airplane had made the same trip from two mike eight to mike zero two just over three weeks previously the pilot left home plate just after lunch in the first sortie uh for after lunch for the uh hour long flight to mike 02 and then he returned just prior to midnight that same day the fuel point at mike zero two is normally a full service but only opened during business hours and there was no so he didn't get fuel at mike zero two before he went back to charles baker and there was no apparent fuel purchase upon returning to to my gate charles baker the mishap trip to mike 02 then departed at 7 30 in the evening with an arrival at uh at 8 41 28 41 20 41 to you 24 hour guys like me the mishap pilot arrived after the fbo closed and taxied the fuel pump and it turns out that there's surveillance video that shows him getting out of the airplane walking to the fuel pump and then after a short time he got back to the airplane and then started it up again moved into parking no fuel getting ready to depart at 2 am the next morning the video shows that the airplane then taxi to the fuel pump sat there with the engine running for three minutes before heading out to the runway for takeoff and the return trip to my gate well the mishaf aircraft mishap aircraft it's easy for you to say was an a36 that appears stock at least it did not have tip tanks so the normal fuel load of 74 gallons was its total capacity when i calculated the trip trip profile for these two trips unrefueled the airplane would have gotten back to the home airport with nine gallons of fuel that's for a perfect airplane in the factory at a particular power setting unfortunately uh oh sorry officially he needed just over 13 or 11 gallons of reserve fuel at his destination depending on whether he flew richard peak or lana peak another thing we don't know from the cursory inventory done by the faa is that okay how much fuel what is all that stuff either way it was obviously did not have the required fuel reserves and the odds that this particular airplane achieved booked numbers is unlikely it appears that he had much less well it appears that he had much less fuel than an optimistic calculation would predict so a likely scenario had him exhaust the fuel in the left tank and that prompted the divert to mkl remember mkl's here he passed it and then turned back to it with old fuel gauges the probably pilot probably didn't have any real accurate idea of how much fuel he actually had i think any we can actually learn some pretty big lessons from this mishap that could prevent others in the future so let's not wait two years for the ntsb to complete its report how do we break this chain well first my nickel on the grass is the from the beginning of the mishap evolution is simple okay if you're going cross country fill up the tanks or then if you have other issues plan on a short hop to a place where you can fill up the tanks or don't go what happened to this pilot is a steep price to pay for being in a hurry for the fourth leg of this accident chain if you follow the mishap pilot's flight path uh there were two airports within 30 miles of his departure point well within his fuel capability and within five miles of the flight plan that's pretty close and they both had self-serve fuel frankly he should have stopped for gas if he departed home flight home plate with full fuel he could have made both legs to mike zero two and then back without stretching it okay four legs is too much fuel should not be an afterthought that's the big takeaway on the number one issue okay second it's very possible that it that this pilot was suffering from githuritis okay he was in a hurry and that severely affected his judgment and aerial aeronautical decision making he took a big risk with very little chance of success and frankly one that violated a cardinal rule for safety the fuel requirements for vfr and ifr are written in stone slash the fars because pilots died to prove that it's necessary to have a fuel reserve also flying late at night he took off just after two in the morning the accident happened uh about 2 53 and in the wee hours of the morning means that you're more likely to be tired if you woke up in the morning had a full day you're tired and when you're tired you make more mistakes in the air force we have a firm 12 hour duty day and it comes from crew dogs are getting killed making bad decisions when they're tired the airlines also have duty limits as well even with two-man crews so head limits how much you can expose yourself to those tired decisions uh for night flying you have to be on your a-game don't forget your reaction times are also degraded at night and when you're tired your perception is much worse the point being is that you have to be an impartial judge when you're wearing your pilot hat the pilot thing comes first the rest of your life can wait if you're going to go do aviation thing then that comes first fly the plane like you mean it frankly because your life depends on it you know when i was looking at this accident and several others several of the fatal accidents i've looked at lately for accident reviews have involved doctors this was one flying late at night because they had doctor stuff to do during the day i understand they're busy people being a doctor a lawyer but being a doctor and a lawyer doesn't relieve you from the reality of being a human being and there are limits to our ability to perform for days on end or a whole day this of course doesn't apply uh you know to army guys they love to stay up straight for five days you know and they can leap tall buildings in a single bound so get my advice and get some sleep before you fly and again your life depends on it here fourth number four here is engine fire at night what to do what do you do if this happens to you well frankly it really depends on how much altitude you have when it happens flower recently did an interview with a bonanza pilot that has had an engine fire at ten thousand feet and he was able to successfully make it to a runway and landed without hurting himself his passenger and the airplane was reusable afterwards so my nickel is to fly really high at night okay uh but what if the engine quits on you while i'm maneuvering for the descent or in the landing as in this accident i'm sorry but i don't actually have a silver bullet for that if i was in that spot i think it would turn turn towards the lighted area uh if there was one within my gliding distance of course i would set my best glide at either best i mean my glide speed at either best glider or somewhere near men's sink or slash d mms hopefully i would be able to see and avoid the big rocks and the short hairs in the short term but if it's nothing but dark well geez i'm sorry i'd say you do your best bet here is to reduce the energy equation as much as possible try to be near as near the stall as you can before any of the trees or the dark spot and well tighten your seat belts real tight number five i could extol on the benefits of having a good engine monitor with with uh fuel flow uh for any flying frankly any airplane and if you're gonna fly at night i would say that and an autopilot is a necessity i'm chicken you do what you want i do what i want and that's the beauty of america sixth number six i've done some videos on fuel on porting in a bonanza and i think it happens i've demonstrated in mine happening at about five to six gallons left in that tank and what from what we know right now there's no way to know for sure that this was the case in this accident that's why i want to know where that fuel selector valve was but i think it was highly likely that this was the cause of the engine quitting during the descent and fuel importing is a thing you avoid it by planting on landing with an hour's reserve of fuel always that's my nickel on the grass it's what i do it's then switching to the fullest tank at the top of the descent you don't want it low because then you get in trouble so i hope we gleaned some lessons learned out of this unfortunate accident and maybe we can save some lives in the future uh what can i say about making and making videos like this i think it's kind of important that somebody tells these stories so we can learn something so i hope you enjoyed the video um i'm okay with making them and i'm gonna make more in the future because apparently you guys like it and that's cool uh i guess it's part of the whole teaching thing all right so uh anyway if you liked it i'm going to put the hit subscribe that's kind of what it looks like there hit the bell for notifications of the next time and uh hit the like button if you liked it hit the don't like button if you don't like it but if you don't like it and you make that hit that button then tell me what it is that you don't like so i can fix it i appreciate that so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on flywire

Channel: FlyWire- scott perdue

Views: 37,732

Keywords: Flywire, flywire online, flywire youtube, beechcraft bonanza, general aviation, Aviation, F33C, F33 Bonanza, A36 Bonanza, V35 Bonanza, Aerobatic Bonanza, Aerobatics, Acrobatics, Flying, pilot vlog, flight training, flying vlog, cockpit, airplane audio, cfi, pilot life, bonanza, private pilot, commercial pilot, airline pilot, ATP, pilot, atc, travel, travel by plane, flying an airplane, Accident Review, A36 Engine Failure, Engine failure at night, Bonanza fuel unporting

Id: oxj2r8Yqbaw

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020