GreenDayPilot
Well-Known Member
"Learn from other people's msitakes, you don't have time to make all of them yourself."
It was a beautiful day! The sky was blue, the birds were singing... yeah yeah yeah, I just like starting a story that way. It adds to the drama, haha
Feb 14th. I was doing maneuvers with a student in SoCal (near KLGB). It was a C152 at 2500 and about half an hour into the flight, the engine goes from about 2300RPM to a VERY rough 1600RPM.
Instantly I ask, "what'd you do?" followed by "oh S! This S is real!" I do A, B, and a modified C. I have the student squawk 7700 while I tune in 121.5.
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Cessna ______ declaring emergency, engine failure over Angels Gate, I think we're gonna land on the ports."
Someone came back and asked if they wanted me to fwd the message to KLGB. And they did.
At this point the student told me I was fast. I had trimmed it and was going 67 instead of 60. This was my mistake. At 67 I was descending a couple hundred feet a minute. At 60, I was descending maybe 50 feet a minute.
KTOA tower (about 2 miles closer than KLGB) came back and asked if I could make it to the airport. We were at about 2100 feet and I was on about a 5 mile final to their runway. I also had a green field between the runway and our airplane as a backup plan... so I opted to go to the airport instead of a HUGE flat field just under me. A risk? maybe.
Once at about 1.5 mile final we were at 1500 feet and so we slipped it in with flaps. Landed safely and had the trucks with the pretty lil' red lights waiting for us.
I've had a couple other emergencies, including a de-pressurization in an ERJ. However, this one was definitely the scariest. My student didn't seem too freaked out about the whole event, but at the same time, she used to be an EMT (i.e., nerves of steel).
My mistakes and my justification for some of them:
1) I flew a glide speed higher than normal possibly because I'm so used to C172 68KIAS or because I trimmed it wrong. Really, I don't know. If I continued to fly it faster, I would have lost more altitude before I noticed the airspeed error and possibly wouldn't make it to the airport.
2a) I never ran the checklist, but I felt I didn't have time and I had to focus on the flying. Although I did a lot of items (including carb heat), I missed the magnetos. However, I was pretty sure it wasn't the mags as I've had them fail on me before. Regardless, this was a checklist item.
2b) I should have used better CRM and quickly instructed the student to run through the checklist while I flew. She did do this on her own (omitted to mention the mags that I missed), but I should have been quick about instructing her on that.
In the end, it was a pushrod that jammed and basically killed one of the cylinders.
Overall, it was a great learning experience and I hope someone can learn something from this.... I sure did.
It was a beautiful day! The sky was blue, the birds were singing... yeah yeah yeah, I just like starting a story that way. It adds to the drama, haha
Feb 14th. I was doing maneuvers with a student in SoCal (near KLGB). It was a C152 at 2500 and about half an hour into the flight, the engine goes from about 2300RPM to a VERY rough 1600RPM.
Instantly I ask, "what'd you do?" followed by "oh S! This S is real!" I do A, B, and a modified C. I have the student squawk 7700 while I tune in 121.5.
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Cessna ______ declaring emergency, engine failure over Angels Gate, I think we're gonna land on the ports."
Someone came back and asked if they wanted me to fwd the message to KLGB. And they did.
At this point the student told me I was fast. I had trimmed it and was going 67 instead of 60. This was my mistake. At 67 I was descending a couple hundred feet a minute. At 60, I was descending maybe 50 feet a minute.
KTOA tower (about 2 miles closer than KLGB) came back and asked if I could make it to the airport. We were at about 2100 feet and I was on about a 5 mile final to their runway. I also had a green field between the runway and our airplane as a backup plan... so I opted to go to the airport instead of a HUGE flat field just under me. A risk? maybe.
Once at about 1.5 mile final we were at 1500 feet and so we slipped it in with flaps. Landed safely and had the trucks with the pretty lil' red lights waiting for us.
I've had a couple other emergencies, including a de-pressurization in an ERJ. However, this one was definitely the scariest. My student didn't seem too freaked out about the whole event, but at the same time, she used to be an EMT (i.e., nerves of steel).
My mistakes and my justification for some of them:
1) I flew a glide speed higher than normal possibly because I'm so used to C172 68KIAS or because I trimmed it wrong. Really, I don't know. If I continued to fly it faster, I would have lost more altitude before I noticed the airspeed error and possibly wouldn't make it to the airport.
2a) I never ran the checklist, but I felt I didn't have time and I had to focus on the flying. Although I did a lot of items (including carb heat), I missed the magnetos. However, I was pretty sure it wasn't the mags as I've had them fail on me before. Regardless, this was a checklist item.
2b) I should have used better CRM and quickly instructed the student to run through the checklist while I flew. She did do this on her own (omitted to mention the mags that I missed), but I should have been quick about instructing her on that.
In the end, it was a pushrod that jammed and basically killed one of the cylinders.
Overall, it was a great learning experience and I hope someone can learn something from this.... I sure did.
