Tough Day - #OddiesTitan P-51 Mustang Chevy V8 Kitplane - Program Debrief and Emergency Landing

after an easy one-hour flight i returned to the compton airport for a landing in the audi's titan mustang that's when the gear collapsed on land i was able to catch it and power up and go around before i could get the gear to re-lock the engine quick and i had to dead stick the airplane with the broken gear back into the compton airport i'm elliot sigwin let's talk about how this happened [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right welcome to the adi's titan program debrief video i apologize this is a really long one we're trying to take fit a whole program into one video so yes the program ended in an incident at the compton airport but in this video we're gonna go all the way from the initial connection with jim oddi the owner of the airplane all the way through the three flights in the airplane and then finally the incident flight i recognize it's a long journey i recognize this video is really long if you have to use the time stamps please do but i think that coming along for the whole journey will help inform how we ended up where we did end up thank you for coming along before we get too carried away i want to thank some of our sponsors method 7 does a fantastic job of not only creating great aviation eyewear but also supporting important culture within our little niche inside of aviation a big thank you to them for their continued support i'd also like to thank butler parachute butler's line of high speed opening emergency parachutes gives me the confidence i need to do the work that needs doing and i appreciate their support and lastly i want to thank our patreon supporters thank you to those folks that are doing that it means a lot [Music] the titan t-51 mustang is a three-quarter scale mustang replica designed by john williams of the titan aircraft company in south austinburg ohio you may recognize the name titan aircraft from their line of tornado ultralight aircraft the ultralight routes are are strong in this airplane of the mustang replicas that i've flown i've flown three the thunder the stewart and the titan the titan is by far the most practical entry into this class of aircraft the the aircraft is made up of steel tube fuselage covered in aluminum and an aluminum wing it has fabric covered control surfaces according to the faa registry there's approximately 60 uh titan mustangs the the bulk of which are rotax power the suzuki v6 was the initial power plant for the airplane again i'm not an expert if you want to know more about the titan i would go talk to titan however for what i've been able to gather the the suzuki v6 is sort of the engine that started the kit off a lot of them ended up flying with a rotax and then the current engine of choice is the ls chevy v8 this very much matches the history of this aircraft which started out with a rotax flying approximately 100 hours with that rotex engine installed and then the 350 horsepower ls3 was installed for the last 40 hours or so of the airplane's existence the ls installation is automotive in its uh engine controls both the fuel injection and the single plug ignition are both automotive and non-redundant this of course means that the electrical system is critical for the engine to keep running which is a concern but again in the light of 40 trouble free hours from a engine management standpoint i believed the risk was reasonable the ls swap was done at the titan aircraft factory by john williams in ohio [Music] we were first approached about the airplane uh while it was still in ohio the owner jim purchased the airplane and was looking for a way to move the airplane from ohio back to california jim is not a pilot this is the first airplane he's owned this was a sort of an outside of the box purchase for him and uh he was looking for some help we were pretty busy at the time and he there were plenty of people that wanted to help with the project so he was able to find some other folks to help him get the airplane moved from ohio out to the compton airport in los angeles where it was flown a few times before we were brought on board some of those flights are documented on jim's youtube channel i suggest you go check it out we're brought on to the program uh they were dealing with a persistent gearbox issue the airplane had flown from ohio out to california with apparently no trouble then the checkout flight where the gym's pilot was getting checked out in the airplane the gearbox had a problem they then replaced the gearbox the new gearbox came in the company pilot flew the airplane and then the gearbox ran away again so here's some footage of uh ethan's last flight in the airplane it's worth noting that i didn't have this footage when i flew the airplane so the stuff that's pretty up apparent in this footage uh was not avail that information was not available to me when i flew the airplane it's also worth noting that i was not able to get a hold of ethan until after my last flight in the airplane there were some communication issues i think both of us were putting our best efforts in it just we weren't able to connect which was a real disadvantage so you can see the power come up looking at the propeller as well as listening to the engine sound so you can hear the rpm very you'll see him stand the tail up so there comes the tail now yep teal comes up pretty proud height there looks good and then he settles it back down and go ahead goes in and tries to fly there see how the tail never really comes back up but the plane doesn't really start climbing you see he's very busy directionally in pitch and then a little bit in roll i think all this is indicative of a busy pilot busy with an engine doing things that he can't predict which is what he told me later on the phone again talking about the airplane here not talking about ethan's flying i think he did a great job it's worth noting that ethan passed in a motorcycle accident after he and i talked after flight four so i was able to talk to him we were able to debrief both his flight and my flight seemed like a really solid dude and then and then he was lost so i'd like to dedicate the video if i could to ethan and that's when wasabi was approached for the program from our perspective this was for the most part proven airplane with roughly 140 hours on the airplane 40 with this engine installation it seemed like we had made it through the sort of the bathtub phase of risk for the program so that that bathtub being described as most of the risk is likely uh in the infancy uh sort of infancy failure sort of situation and the risk drops into the bathtub phase through the life of the product and then sort of at the end you have a likelihood of failure at the end so that bathtub concept the idea was by getting through the first 140 hours on the airframe 40 hours on the engine we'd gotten through that super high risk phase and for the most part you weren't going to have you know basic mechanical failures that kind of stuff however obviously the gearbox was a major highlight and so i really kind of became laser focused on the gearbox despite all this we started the program where we start all of our programs so i started by just an aircraft inspection which like we've talked about in other videos looks a lot like a condition inspection or an annual inspection so pull all the access doors off and go from the airplane system by system tip to tail uh you know wing tip to wingtip and try to get a feel for what's going on again like we've talked about in other videos a lot of what you're doing here is not only looking at the physical hardware but trying to understand what the relationship with the owner is going to be like this was a particularly interesting uh program in that regard was because the uh owner who was now taking over the maintenance role uh didn't have any aviation experience really you know there was a lot of just trying to figure out what it is he wanted to get out of the program and then therefore how we could add value independent of course from the you know how much risk are we taking on and what's the safest way to move forward both for pilot physical risk as well as risk to the airplane the rest of the program as i went through the airplane we did find some things i think i walked away from that inspection with roughly 10 items all of which jim was able to correct the biggest thing was that the elephant in the room the scary thing in the room was the gearbox how are we going to manage this gearbox issue the both gearbox failures had happened with very very short flights in both cases the canary in the coal mine had been a runaway propeller uh so it seemed like uh if we were gonna have a problem it was gonna be in the first five minutes of the first flight and then we should sort of build our risk protocol our risk procedures around that so we laid out a program that would allow us to sort of tiptoe into that as much as possible trying to bite off that risk in small increments building up to the owner's goal which was to be able to uh to go for a ride in the back of the airplane as he started his flight instruction in the airplane you know sort of a lifetime goal being interested in warbirds and mustangs to be able to to do the mustang thing a lot of that risk profile if we couldn't come up with anything that was a solid risk was defined by the insurance minimum which was five hours minimum solo for me a pilot who hadn't flown a titan mustang before before i could fly with a passenger so uh so that was a very clear minimum uh standard so assuming that there wasn't a gearbox issue anymore we could get those five hours and then we could start working towards putting jim in the back seat and building up to him doing some flying from the backseat [Music] so a quick summary of some of the issues that were found during the inspection first the right aileron bell crank bolt was found to be loose the bolt was shanked so we just had to add a washer second was the right aileron trim servo was loose uh some hardware that needed to be tightened elevator hinge bolt was not tight in the nut so just wasn't going into the uh the nut long enough for threads to be poking out the far side so again simple fix just a thinner washer and now you're secure number five was a the canopy lock on the crank was not functioning so you could crank the canopy shut and then hit the stop but there was nothing holding the canopies there so most of these uh mustang replicas have the just like a real mustang they have a crank there on the right side of the cockpit and the uh the crank itself ends up functioning as a lock so you would get to the spot where the canopy comes closed dink the canopy comes closed then you release the lock and it you know usually some sort of a pin in this case that detent wasn't functioning there was a backup latch where the the where the two frames came together on the canopy rails like uh like you would see on a suitcase or something you could close and that was actually what was holding the canopy shut so we squat that the shoulder harnesses was just a simple loop so it went from the lap belt up and around around the top of the seat and then back down the other shoulder and as a result it just sort of fell all over the place i just uh squawked that it needed to be secured the manifold pressure gauge was sticking so just replace it in the briefings that we i had done with the other pilots it became clear that the flaps were an issue on the titan mustang with the v8 installation it's more of a forward cg thing than a v8 installation thing there were no indication of flat position so with the feedback from the other pilots it was really important not to put too much flaps in etc and i had no indication of flat position so we squat that so people got really excited about the flap indication marks on the hawkin uh lancer so just went through that here as far as how we marked the flaps the big thing here is that we're putting a mark on the flap itself and that needs to be visible from the cockpit so i'm sitting in the cockpit and then uh jim is sitting out in the wing with a protractor uh of course we're setting a new zero because the airplane's in three point set of zero swing the flaps for the full extent and then we're breaking it down for the uh the critical marks for the flaps owners had said that anything more than about 50 of flaps the airplane would run out of pitch authority in the flare more on that later so that was we want to make sure we had a mark for that so the flaps have 30 degrees of travel uh so the idea was to mark it in 10 degree increments and then the 50 50 flaps would be a 10 degree mark and a 20 degree mark and you would split it for the 50 flaps and first of all do you want it so if 10 degrees is when you can see the whole black so the first step here was we just did full travel full flaps down full flaps up and check that there is in fact 30 degrees of travel there is and then here you can see jim putting down a piece of tape that corresponds to each of the 10 degree increments a little further back other than that pretty straight forward right about there okay yep both the water temperature gauge and the psru oil temperature gauges were down in the foot wells so sort of where your knees would live these two gauges got to go i thought i could work around them but i can't and with my gangly legs it wasn't working so i asked that those be moved the one more interesting ones is that if you walked around the airplane it became apparent if you just looked at the two main gear that the uh the right main gear just wasn't pointing the same direction as the airplane it was tweaked both in the roll axis and in the yaw axis so i asked that the owner reached out to titan and confirmed that that was with a limit so that was acceptable there was no reason to think that that had happened since the airplane had gotten to california that most likely it had flown from ohio like that i just wanted to make sure that everybody was on the same page that the gear was considered safe before we went on to fly it lastly was really directly related to the previous flight so uh when ethan was flying the airplane in both cases when the propeller ran away it ran to a very very high rpm so you know i don't need to tell people that have experience with constant speed propellers this but that is very much dictated by the fine pitch of the propeller so if you uh your rule of thumb is that you put just as as coarse of a fine pitch in as you can bear so that in the event of a propeller runaway you have as much power available as possible so long story short if the governor fails the prop is going to latch to a of the finest pitch that it can which is set by a mechanical stop usually up in the hub so when it goes super fine now you can rev the engine very very high it just over revs and when it over revs eventually it'll just push the rods through the case without ever making any thrust without making any any you know anything that's going to hold you in the air and when you're you're pawing around the field with a runaway propeller you need every bit of thrust you could get so long story short you want to make that fine pitch stop as course as possible so that you know maybe you have to redline the motor maybe you have to go beyond red light in the motor but you have some chance of making enough thrust to stay airborne to paddle the airplane around the airport and get back on the ground so i wanted to confirm that and that was the list coming out of the ground inspection uh we capped off the ground inspection with a ground run so we pushed the airplane outside and did a run there on the ramp at the compton airport this was my first time running a titan it was i think my first time running an ls motor and it was a chance to get a feel for the interesting uh handling qualities etc of the titan mustang checklist thing uh the other one sure that's the uh this is the general one yeah yeah if you got the other one i'll take it in general throughout this whole program procedures were an issue so here the two checklists that are being discussed are one a titan prepared checklist and two a checklist that jim himself prepared the titan checklist while containing all the different phases of flight is not specific to the systems installed in this aircraft uh jim's uh checklist while being very thorough and very specific for that airplane is only just an engine start checklist which is basically as far as he had got okay so accessories on avionics on pull off the left whichever they're both full so so why don't i hear it oh because the the main switch there you go a quick tip uh trick that i like to use uh in these processes especially as you get into weird engines and weird engine installations the checklist will walk you through uh what how to do a start uh it's important that you take a second and figure out you know once you engage the start whether it's turning on the starter or engaging the start sequence or whatever it is that you take a second and recognize what am i going to do if if i don't like to start starter just on the right side like a car that turns the engine out of it does not turn it off turn off you have to hit one of those switches those are the easiest ones yeah there's no mixture lever how do i stop it clear so this would be considered the low low speed taxi basic brakes basic tailwheel steering all at you know sort of a five mile an hour pace one of the big things that had come up on the phone with the other operators the airplane maybe you couldn't do a run up or or you would have to be careful doing a run up that uh with the cg so far forward and the gears sort of far back that at full power or maybe even at mag check or you know engine check rpm or propeller cycle check rpm that the airplane would actually have enough thrust to tip over on the nose and you wouldn't be able to hold it the tail down with the elevator this could be made worse uh with the flaps and now we taxi back and shut down obviously we're super conservative about uh flipping over right like we've been talking about that all day but yeah but it seemed to be fine huh i mean i was up to 18 inches yeah which is as much power as anybody's talked about running this thing on the ground right uh-huh um i didn't know there was trying to lift it all it looked like it was rock steady so again i'm trying to figure out how interested in the program i am maybe thirsty is the wrong word but um i was very eager to have uh flown the third of the three major mustang replica uh types just for comparison's sake but this was a moment where you're sort of trying to you know piece together the reality of the situation this is not a low-risk program whether or not you can communicate that to the owner so with the ground run complete check that box the next step would be to go fly the airplane assuming that the squawks were taken care of well i'm sorry the clock kind of ran out on us i feel like we got a lot done though so after about a month it took about a month for jim to work through the squawks came back down to compton for what ended up being the first flight of the airplane sorry for what ended up being my first flight of the airplane again there were general concerns the the previous two propeller runways had happened within you know seconds of getting airborne in both cases uh ethan made you know basically one lap around the airport so it seemed likely that if we were going to have a gearbox failure it was going to be sort of on that time scale and then the new added thing that we'd have in our pocket is a we were ready for it we maybe even expected it in b we had changed the fine pitch stop of the propeller we'd done a bunch of runs on the ground so run the engine check the gearbox run the engine check the gearbox looking for debris in the gearbox after the fix and we weren't seeing any debris at some point you have to kind of go out and fly it so the goal was to make just the shortest flight that we could right so power the airplane up climb up right to bailout altitude if everything looks stable hang out for a second but then power back normal landing and check the gearbox and that's what we did compton woodley airport automated weather observation one niner three five zero weather visibility more than one zero sky conditions clear below one two minus seven celsius altimeter three zero one eight that's good check check [Music] clear prop the throttle response on this engine was incredible the geared motor so the propeller is not turning very fast the propeller itself is very very light combined with probably a throttle friction thing [Music] after the run-up controls check and then call for the runway [Music] experimental 9-1 right high-speed so for my first flight in the airplane i'm trying to treat it sort of like an actual first flight so what that means is uh starting with a high-speed taxi to verify the propeller operation again without being committed to going flying so with that high speed taxi complete we just taxied back for the first uh actual takeoff copper trap experimental 911 uniforms clearly active fist pumps for jim copper traffic uniform departing runway seven right we'll be staying in the traffic pattern climbing up above the airport [Music] [Music] uh standard uh first flight type stuff uh landing configuration stalls at altitude you can see here i'm fiddling with the flaps they're going up and down a little bit as i try to hit that 15 degree mark so here's the landing configuration stall based on this i could see that this was going to be an issue the cg being so far forward with those stalls complete uh ready for rtb again trying to keep the time down to minimize the risk exposure uh with the gearbox and here we are coming into landing i think you saw it on the takeoff but here on the landing it's just another reminder of just how poor of an airport compton is for flight tests right yes it's a patch of great asphalt great crash rescue all the things that we're gonna learn as we go forward this program but it's surrounded by a lot of really not nice places to land put the gear out uh gear is a handle on the left side of the cockpit down uh like below your knee and then put the flaps out let's mount it on the lower left side of the panel [Music] [Music] so there you can see i was having trouble arresting the descent because i was at the aft stop of the elevator the fix there would be to add some throttle which would have blown the tail or at least minimize the amount that the propeller was slowing down the air that was going over the tail or just add approach speed or reduce the amount of flaps again this is my first landing that was a very good for first landing but we're just dialing in these systems the other big observation is that once you're down on the mains i like to wheel in the airplane the transition from you know tail high wheel landing to setting the tail down uh was very big the airplane sits with a very nose high attitude and you go from landing and then i like to kind of raise the tail and plant the airplane down on the mains gives you good firm braking but as the elevator starts to run out of travel you can't really hold the other the tail up anymore there's that moment as you're sort of decelerating you're losing elevator authority you're trying to gently set the tail down and the fact that it's so far back and you're so blind you know obviously there's anxiety did the tail wheel come down that kind of stuff but also just it's a big transition there's a lot of angular transition which means that all the inertia of the rotating inertia of the propeller is now translating to directional stuff and that makes for a lot of stuff going on if i was to comment on sort of fundamental things about the titan that's a big one is that the three point attitude is very nose-hot got back to the hangar and i think uh this guy might be my favorite part of the maybe the whole program i hope when i get to this point in my life i have an airport i can go to and hang out this guy's got this three-wheel bicycle and he seems to just sort of be cruising the airport talking to people uh he gets to be around airplanes all day which clearly he's passionate about he had lots to say about you know having spent uh what appeared to be a lifetime in aviation he knew a lot about stuff that was going on in aviation and it made him uh enjoyable to talk to uh reminded me a lot of uh of myself and and hopefully like i said a goal of where one could end up in a best case kind of situation that's pretty good right on the numbers so that first flight uh was uh 0.6 hours from chocks to chocks that put us in the air for just about 20 minutes so about 0.3 hours airborne with that first flight complete we came back and checked the oil so that everything came down to the gearbox health so we just used the dipstick to look for particulate on the oil of course this oil now had you know 20 minutes of run time on it so it was very much it looked like very much clean oil but there was no signs of debris and with that we started moving towards flight two in this video you can see jim checking the engine oil yes the gearbox and the engine oil are separate and yes we checked both [Music] so that brings us to flight two flight two was basically a longer version of flight one again the goal was to take that now we put 0.6 on the gearbox we want to bring that up to an even two hours before we change the lube in the gearbox this was going with a new plan from the owner from jim he wanted to to make it a company policy that uh the gearbox oil was changed every two hours until he got confidence again in the gearbox manufacturer from my standpoint the goal was to minimize the risk and stabilize the uh engine operations so i didn't want to you know be sawing on the power and running weird power setting etc the goal was to get everything as stable as possible so 1.4 plus 0.6 equals two 1.4 hours from chocks to chocks uh orbiting at 3 500 feet which worked out nice with the air space there over our compton at a cruise power setting which we were calling uh 3000 rpm and 20 inches and then one uh normal landing again with the things that we had learned from the first landing on flight one we were trying to apply that so i went from an approach speed of 80 miles per hour this is statute to an approach speed of 85 and then i moved that flap setting from the uh 15 20 degrees of flaps that i used on the first landing to the more like 10 to 15 degrees on the second landing again with those big flaps came a lot of pitching moment which meant there was less elevator available so by getting rid of a little bit of flap we could have more elevator available and give us more chance to round out and stabilize that landing of course this comes back to the next question which probably everybody's already asking which is uh it sounds like the flaps aren't helping it sounds like all the flaps are doing is actually increasing your approach speed which is sort of the opposite reason why you would put flaps out a thousand percent it turns out uh and maybe it's obvious but most owners if the airplane's got a lever they want to use the lever so in this case at this cg i i would argue the flaps didn't make much sense i would say in most of the mustang replicas that's true because the p51 has really big flaps and on these little airplanes it's just that you don't need the drag the pitching moment that comes with it is is uh excessive and then there's handling qualities issues uh you know every one of the uh the mustangs i've flown the mustang wrap because i've flown have has pitch issues based on the big flaps so why are we using the big flaps um and again i think it just comes down to owners want to use them so anyway so the plan was to use a little bit less flap try the flight again put the time on the gearbox get back on the ground swap the gearbox oil out and see where we were from a gearbox standpoint compton woodley airport automated weather observation five zulu weather wind calm visibility more than one zero sky condition clear below one two thousand temperature two five celsius two point minus seven w alpha the flight went well so i won't bore you with videos of me flying racetracks however i will show you the landing i think there's some interesting stuff there comfort traffic 9-1 uniforms final seven right gears down pressures up you can see that the touchdown was controlled but i still wouldn't say i was happy with the landing uh you can see from the over the shoulder angle how the elevator seemed to sort of hit that off stop stop or at least i was very close to the up stop and again that's just a really uncomfortable position to be in when the ground is coming up so in a flare situation between flights two and three we changed the oil in the gearbox again checking for debris i could find uh no substantial debris a very very small amount of non-ferrous smaller than sand debris in the oil um and with that i was confident uh refilling the the gearbox obviously and proceeding for flight three flight three was very similar to flight two except that i cut it a little bit shorter uh the day was getting long and i needed to get home to the family i hear some footage of the belly of the airplane after the last flight so we didn't clean the belly in between flights so that's all the oil that it accumulated through uh three hours of flying in one day uh you can see there's a couple drips on the ground there's a little bit of oil on the belly but there's nothing significant uh all indications that the airplane was happy and that we would be moving towards flight four very soon flight three was 1.1 hours i landed at 3 40 in the afternoon again just giving me just enough time to get over the hill back to mojave in time to give the kids bath and put them to bed so we think that's wing tip that's prop and that's the left main gear so flight four was scheduled to be the last or nearly the last flight without jim in the back seat the gearbox seemed to be performing and therefore jim was looking forward to starting his training in the airplane jim had planned on using the practice area on the up by redlands airport on the north side of the la basin for that flight training type activity but i had recommended one off the south side of torrance they're sort of just off the coast like you were heading to catalina so as a result on this flight i headed that direction to check out the area it was my first time leaving the glidecone of the compton airport and there was no shortage of anxiety about that traffic experiment couple quick orbits over the compton airport and then out to the uh to the coast uh i did a couple turns and then very quickly flew back to compton to get back in the glide cone and then at the one hour mark i was going to start doing a couple takeoffs and landings there at compton uh to round out like i said at around 1.5 hours getting us real close to that five hour minimum that the insurance had so here we are rolling on the final you can see that i have three green so that right main is indicating down and locked approach was normal with that 10 to 15 degree flaps and 85 mile per hour approach speed my apologies for all the oil on the camera this is unfortunately the the best external view i have for showing the upcoming event so that moment i wasn't sure if uh if i had actually touched the wing uh when the gear had collapsed you know i added power uh i was pretty confident i hadn't touched the propeller but i hadn't felt it in the controls that i touched the wing i hadn't felt a grinding on that right wing but meanwhile while being heroic i'm not sure that uh aborting the landing had done anything else more than put me sort of in another predicament right am i gonna do now so after that gear collapsed the right main indicated uh unlocked you can see that on the left side of the cockpit so i did the standard shimmy shimmy cocoa pop you know directional and and g oscillations to try to get the gear to shake out with no change i also took a moment to check for uh handling in the roll axis again concerned that that right aileron had made contact with the runway you can see here i reach for the gear like i'm going to pull it up to commit to landing on the belly and this was probably the um the first moment where i start to let the owner into the cockpit so again in this bigger context of jim not being an airplane owner there was a lot of stuff that um i was sort of letting him know as he needed to know it rather than trying to do sort of a deep dive up front and it was at this moment i knew you know i had shaken the airplane the gear wasn't going to come out i knew now that i was going to crash today uh and now my next thought was well how do i you know warn jim or prepare jim for what's coming because you know not being an airplane guy he this is all going to come at him really fast and so that's when you can see i hesitate to uh to fiddle with the gear and i start figuring out well am i going to text him am i going to call him like how will i let him know again jim had a habit of leaving the airport during the flights from his perspective again this is a proven airplane right this is he's a car guy uh hanging out the airport maybe isn't his thing i don't know but he would you know go away when i went away because he figured there was no reason to be there so i needed to get him back to the airport to kind of let him know what was coming it's at this moment that uh brett came on the radio hello compton traffic there is what looks to be a p51 on the left now one for two five lefty on yeah we're on frequency frequency okay yeah i'm not sure that was just parked and i just had noticed that you're as i'm sure you already saw that when you went around is that your right main uh kind of wheel buckled so this is a fascinating new variable that i've never dealt with before you know i've got a fair amount of experience with you know with a well-briefed safety chase i have a fair amount of experience with indoctrinated uh team members that are on the ground and trying to provide assistance but in this case i have this voice on the radio person i don't know personally at all who can potentially add a lot of value uh you know i need all the help i can get at this point but you know it's hard to know uh what he knows right what is his background that's correct is there anything left on the runway and just as i'm starting to figure out how to uh how to talk to brett about all this stuff the engine tries to quit everything's okay and the the gear is back down now so you have two uh two fully down but it did buckle when you put pressure on it in that moment you can see the dining cycle you can see the tax cycle so globally right as an engine operator in this moment the engine had stumbled uh i knew the engine was electronically controlled and therefore there wasn't like a you know a mixture knob i could play with or you know the fuel system was relatively simple there wasn't much i could do so i wasn't confident that the engine wasn't going to stumble again and with that i sort of realized that this whole thing was going to be over pretty quick another thing that sort of interestingly also gets imprinted in my mind in this moment is that i had wiggled the throttle and that locks in is maybe being related to what's causing the engine to stumble pressure on it okay so [Applause] [Music] you're not um any position where you could uh let the owner uh be aware of what's going on with gear so at this point i figure the engine is about to quit i'm sort of on a base turn sort of like i can make the runway from where i am but again i go back into this like bringing the owner into the cockpit thing where i'm like god i'd just love to warn him about what's going on you know if justin was here and he had a fire bottle i wish i'm wishing that justin was here for the impending crash that's coming yeah i i'm not from here actually i'm from santa monica do you have a number you want me to give him a call let him know so i give him jim's number okay i'll give him a call and then i'll call you back with that uh without response for you thank you and just to be clear uh i'm gonna want any debrief you got on the condition of that right here so the customer relations side was saying let's let the customer know what's going on the other side was i need to know what what brett knew if anything about uh what had happened what things i couldn't see things that were on the other side of the wing what did he know about the position and condition of the gear and based on that knowledge uh helped me and for my decision whether we're going to try to land with the gear how it is whether we're going to try cycling the gear to try to get a different answer or whether we're going to pull the gear up and land on the belly recognizing i had a little bit of time here i took the moment to clean the airplane up so it flaps up again you can see i put my hand on the gear light lever like i'm going to pull it up but again i'm i'm i'm waiting to try to involve jim in the decision again too much customer relations so about 90 seconds past here hey i uh just had a phone conversation with jim and he's gonna make his way down towards the craft where we have some radio communication for you this next bit is some of the most fascinating uh like radio communication stuff i've ever experienced in flight test sounds good and then uh if you got any debrief on what you saw you said the gear buckled i'm not sure what that means okay so when your main wheels touch down your left one was stable and your right one gave way so it didn't really take any pressure and it probably went probably went inward about 20 to 30 degrees and then you mustn't sense that did go around i've never met brett uh i don't know anything about his background but the pressure is really high so how do you maximize the efficiency of the conversation so that we can figure out who he is and get the information that he has uh you know as efficiently as possible okay so uh buckled implies that the main strut may have collapsed it appeared the strut was intact from your perspective yeah it looks so um yeah it did give me a kind of a second to decipher exactly how to put that in words but as soon as your right main touch the entire uh strut itself kind of bent inwards um i guess it kind of gave way under the pressure the lack of hydraulics essentially i think it goes without saying that this is a fantastic example of the value of really good safety chase and when we say safety chase people think about formation they think about being in the right position and i think what's illustrated here is that the more important thing is that you're able to speak the same language and have confidence on both sides of the conversation so that the things i say mean the same thing in your head and vice versa right so from my perspective my guess is the lock failed so the strut is intact but this the uh lock is no longer folk shoes that match what you think you saw that is an affirmative yes if you want to do a kind of low pass here we can kind of get an idea of what your strut looks like make sure it looks healthy and solid still again it was more than i could communicate in the moment but the idea of doing a low pass to check gear position after that engine stumble uh it was going to take a lot of convincing to put me in that position not so much the coming into the low pass but that moment after the low pass where you're depending on the engine to get away from the ground and not end up in that neighborhood of houses let's give jim a second here to get on the frequency temps are stable so far but this thing doesn't like flying around with gear down understandably do you want to try to do some i don't i don't know anything about this playing some g-force maneuvers and see if you can get it to lock i already tried that but now i like where you're thinking the only thing it's on my question mark is whether we just give up suck the gear up and land on the belly or whether we try to put some pressure on that right gear okay give me about two minutes and i'll get back to you at plenty of fuel uh we got probably another hour's worth of gas but i don't think this is going to last that long during the next three minutes it takes for jim to get to the radio i decide to uh climb to altitude to slow the airplane to try again the shimmy shimmy cocoa pop but at a lower speed and also try cycling the gear to see if i can get a different answer as far as the down locks hey elliot hey boss how you doing so i assume you've tried the positive g thing to get the gear to lock down right i have again just a fascinating communication problem you do have some extra gas in that rear tank and then um yeah how about if you try to put the gear up and down again or that's um it's a side skid thing so the air flow tries to push the gear outward to lock it down i tried that already i just haven't tried it at slow speed so climbing up the altitude now we'll try that he was saying and then the engine quit so speeds 100 miles an hour we're about 3 100 feet msl i'm basically directly over the runway on like a high upwind near the departure end of the runway so that's a big left-hand 180 to line up with downwind headed for low key low key being sort of adjacent to an opposite heading of your touchdown point and here i have just a few seconds to try to troubleshoot in the bigger context i knew i was going to crash today i didn't see that there was much i was going to do in the cockpit even if i got the engine running it wasn't going to change the outcome of the day very much but i knew that what would absolutely change the outcome of the day is not making it to the airport so i was absolutely focused on making it to the airport less so on troubleshooting again based on that previous stumble i believe that sawing on the throttle had something to do with the engine quitting obviously it didn't work this time and then it's a basic check of the switch positions in the cockpit so so there's three main switches that control the engine there's the starter switch the coil switch and the fuel injector switch and then there's the row of circuit breakers i check all those and then after that just few seconds of troubleshooting it's just focused on trying to make the airport this is an interesting moment where i decided i was high so i make a couple s turns the last one of which is pretty deep and then i turned back to the north uh back towards base and that's when i knew i was in trouble that last s turn was just way too deep and now uh with the wind coming out of the north i was going to have trouble making the airport so i reached down and feathered the prop to increase my glide ratio so again there's different schools on whether or not you feather the proper when you feather the prop from my perspective if i have the airport made i'd rather keep the prop in the fine position so that i have it in moments like this as a last get out of jail free card to make the airport i'm sure there'll be people that that feel the other way about it that you should feather immediately after an engine failure so you can see right here as i'm cutting that corner from base to final i think i can make the airport but i know it's going to be tight okay so we've got a p51 replica coming in with a gear issue we've been communicating with him for the last 15 minutes [Applause] it's hard to communicate on a long emergency like this just how tired you are at the end of it and i didn't really feel it until this moment when the airplane came to a stop and i had to chant to myself fire fire fire to remind myself what was the rush to get out of the seat i was just exhausted [Music] i can't hear you got earplugs i was the british guy you were speaking to on the radio i appreciate the help man no the engine quit right as we were talking oh wow congratulations man we're here i appreciate it you were very helpful thank you you're very welcome i know you had other things to do today to decide to deal with it i'm assuming that you're in command so the big question uh what happened specifically two things number one uh why did the gear collapse and number two why did the engine quit first question why did the gear collapse the short answer is we don't know talking to john williams at titan aircraft there has never been a gear collapse when the gear was down and locked so that would lead you to believe that the gear was rigged improperly and that's what caused the gear to collapse emergency started with a it was an attempted landing just so we're clear here i'm not here to assess blame the ntsb has finished their uh investigation the faa finished their investigation the insurance company has finished their investigation i'm not here to assess blame i'm not here to talk about who made mistakes they're born for probably another 15 minutes during which time we scrambled jim that's jim right there so there's two people that touched the gear recently first was john williams during the engine installation at titan at the very least that whatever he did to the gear would have had all the landings it took to get the airplane from ohio to california which we'll say is 10 landings plus ethan's two landings and then my say five landings um so that's what 20 landings since uh john touched it got jim on the radio just in time for the complete electrical failure the other person that had touched the gear is the owner jim jim touched it in between ethan flying the airplane to my flying airplane so you know whatever my 510 landing something like that had all happened uh since uh jimmy touched the airplane so regardless of uh whether the problem came from the work that was done in compton or the work that was done in ohio there were several landings after that work was done where the gear functioned properly i was a little bit short a little low on energy the next question is why did the engine quit so the short answer is that the hydraulic system took out the main bus and the main bus took out the engine again we've already talked about the airplane is non-redundant so it's all automotive non-redundant electrically driven fuel injection and ignition systems so without a main bus you don't have an engine the last piece is the relationship between the mechanical down locks and the hydraulic system pulled the prop back and was able to extend the glide so you can see where we're at right now the displaced threshold is just past that taxiway there in most aircraft that use the parker hydraulic power pack which is most home built with retractable gear they use the pressure switches that are installed in the power pack so there's a high pressure switch and a low power pressure switch when the pressure in the system gets below a set point the pump turns on and then when it reaches the high set point it turns off so therefore from my perspective as a pilot when i saw that the gear had collapsed and i looked down and checked that we were at 450 psi which is a high pressure set point for the system my assumption was that the pump had cycled off but that was holding pressure if the pressure had not built up one would assume that the pump was on since it was at the high pressure switch limit one would assume the pressure switch was off and i was able to hold the right main up for a little while but it wouldn't take any pressure so it pretty quickly collapsed once it collapsed the wing dug in and spun around went for a little bit of a ride the difference is that titan turns the pump on and off not with the pressure switches but with the down locks so as soon as that gear collapsed and the light in the cockpit turned off the pump turned on and since the transition light which is called out by the titan plans was not installed there's no way for the pilot to know that the pump was running airplane never uh flipped over obviously so what happened was the pump overwhelmed the main bus the main bus has a circuit breaker the circuit breaker is not in the normal line of circuit breakers on that bottom row it's above the master switch up on the top of the panel and then that circuit breaker uh was set to the plans to be at a 25 amp breaker it was a 30 amp breaker which is good that they sized that breaker up when they installed the big fuel pumps and the hydraulic pump in the airplane however the fuel pumps plus the hydraulic pump meant that every time the hydraulic pump was turned on that load combined with the fuel pump load of the airplane was above that of the main breaker the 30 amp breaker on the main bus which means that every time uh that airplane took off and the gear was cycled up the engine could have quit the way it did on that flight it hadn't uh and it's again uh back to that bathtub concept of risk uh while we had assumed that since we got through that first 140 hours we'd expose the airplane to most of these scenarios this was a scenario that the airplane had not been exposed to so here's a rough timeline of the events things of note from the aircraft coming to a stop to the first emergency vehicle arriving on scene which was the airport vehicles from the compton airport was just about 50 seconds you can see the firefighters foaming the airplane that's a compton fire rescue procedure anytime gasoline is found at the scene of the accident so basically it's not surprising but the fuel stops break off uh when the airplane's sliding on the ground and then the fuel tank is basically emptying the grass once the fire department sees the gas they want to foam the airplane down back to some other points it was really cool to see the fire department so eager to help so eager to uh maybe exercise their toys uh however you want to put it but they were clearly excited to be there excited support despite it being a very hot day and wearing fire uniforms and that weather i'm sure wasn't fun as a kid you know you get in trouble and the thing that always bothered me the most about being in trouble is when i realized how much i was inconveniencing other people with my silly decisions there was a definitely a moment like that here they actually shut the compton airport down for the entire time that we were on the runway during that time the airport was closed and a mooney came in and landed obviously hadn't checked the nodems they tried talking on the radio he was having a radio problem so he couldn't hear them telling him that the airport was closed watching this guy who was clearly you know just up for a an easy saturday flight or whatever uh get ramp checked effectively because he popped a note ham because you know i crashed an airplane on runway was a hard moment and an interesting uh byproduct of the events of that day here's some interesting views uh of the airplane after the wreck you can see yes the the right wing made contact after the gear collapsed uh on the final time it's hard to know whether it made contact the first time my guess is it didn't but we have no way of knowing um but you can see the damage to that outboard rib of the aileron uh here's the the wrecker when it first showed up interesting side note records actually charged not only for the number of hours they're on site but for the number of times they change the load they pick it up so it turned out we had two pickups the first pickup was just to get the propeller off pick the airplane up enough that you can pop the propeller off and then we could get a better grip on it so that we could lift it and drag it back to the hanger here's the uh wrecking company that uh that did the work they did a really good job if you told me that you were going to hire a semi-truck style wrecking truck to come pick up the airplane i would have been really nervous uh yes it was clearly a challenge for them to pick up something that was so light and fragile uh but i was impressed with the good job that they did so the plan was to put the bulk of the load on the engine mount and then allow the tail to drag on the ground plan had been to stabilize the wings by hand just two guys walking next to the airplane the wrecking truck has those cables that are independently controlled so he could actually just put those as just sort of guide wires put just a little bit of tension on him and stabilize the airplane and roll and then like i said the bulk of the weight was hanging off the engine mount with a little bit on the tail and drag it back to the hanger and then like i said here we are five hours later after uh crashing the airplane pushing the airplane back into the hangar thank you for staying with us for the whole video i know it was long i hope you got some value out of it if you have any questions things that didn't make sense i'll meet you in the comments down below this is there's a lot here it's a complex thing it was hard figuring out how to edit it what to leave in what to leave out there's plenty of stuff they got left out so let me know in the comments and we'll try to give you the feedback that you need thanks again for coming along airplanes are cool you

Channel: Elliot Seguin

Views: 320,073

Keywords: test pilot, flight, flying, aircraft, pilot, titan mustang, experimental aircraft, Chevrolet V8, LS Engine, Aviation, Elliot Seguin

Id: 4PHTVTw_Y2A

Length: 54min 19sec (3259 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021