Forced Landing Poll

[hobbsmeter]

Knock On Wood...

1725 Hours
0 Failures or Forced Landings
Pretty smooth sailing so far, knock on wood!

 

[newmei]

I was flying right seat in a C-170 climbing shallowly out of a private strip in central america. Kaboom!!!! Shook and shudered at 700 agl and I though it be a good idea to turn around towards the strip, at about that time I decided I'd let the higher time guy fly it (I had 80 hours, less than a year as a PP) I then troubleshooted while he flew and it finally gave out. Fields left and right, river straight ahead surrounded with 100' tall trees. One field was green with TALL grass (4 ft or so probably) the other was brown with what appeared was dead grass. I said go right we did and since it was a straight in approach we did see the obstructions on the field. It had 8 foot tall berms that the ag equipment used to cross and it also retained water. So we had to miss these things and time the landing. As we were coming in I saw that there was water standing in the field. I said ut oh!!! Touched down nice and smooth but it did'nt matter we bounced around on the ruts and skidded on our nose staring at the ground wizzing by, finally the left wing and gear caught a rut and over we went doing about 35-45. About a 50 ft ground roll. It knocked the left seater out for a few seconds and knocked the crap out of me. I'm sitting there hanging and saw him just lifeless, just as I went to pull at him to see what was wrong with him, he said "I'm still here" dropped out of his seat as I did right after him and we went out. We were both so confused that I went out his door and he went out mine. I ended up with the bigger cuts as I took out the overhead speaker with my head.


I have 1200 TT and that is my only complete engine failure and only crash. It also one a short field landing in my book. It was caused by a improperly installed rocker arm. While most of the time they will run on partial cylinders this rocker arm snapped and shut the exhaust valve causing a extreme pressure. My advice ony partial power failures is that they do is give you warning on the impending complete failure in most cases.

Enough Detail?

PS the engine only had 65 hours on it.

 

[c172]

forced landing

175hr/1 forced landing

 

[Salty Dog]

Way back at 230 hrs (just shy of 400 now) I was taking off in a 172 at night w/ 2 pax from a lighted 5K' field when the engine starting running extremely rough at about 450 ft on climbout. Double crammed full rich and full throttle, (already there) double checked fuel select both, mags both, and tried carb heat (alt air) no luck. Still making ~2000 rpm and climbing ever so slowly. Didn't want to do the ol' ditch straight ahead thing while there was life left in the horse so I started a slow turn to the left. (closer to taxiway anyway)

Told my pax that noise isn't right and we're making a precautionary landing (severe understatement) and considered switching to App Cont (untowered field but nearby class C) but decided against it as I now had the field made and they would only give me a lot of help I really didn't need and the engine was not getting worse - or better. (stuck to aviate and navigate only) Didn't touch to power again 'till over the numbers and actually landed smoothly.

All the while I'm guessing the pax are praying for their lives and vowing never to fly again. Taxi to only light on field to shut down/look it over and then hear the voice of the teenage girl from the back, "why did we come back here?" So much for white knuckle flyers...

Final analysis: stuck exhaust valve on 130 hr O-360. Looking back, not that big of a deal. At the time, real eye-opener! That's as exciting as I want to get, thank you very much.

Great thread.

 

[Joseph II]

260, 0 Failures, one really scarry carb ice incident in a 152 at night with my wife. It wasn't the engine's fault, but my fault for not knowing a lot about carb ice, and how to remedy it.

 

[Lonestar]

1500/0

 

[Africa Pilot]

My 2 cents

In a little over 1100 hours, I've thankfully had no engine failures (only one time I was unable to get an engine restarted after feathering on a C-310), but I did watch the instigator of this poll make a nice one on a road.

 

[flyhi]

1600TT
800 recip/0 forced (thankfully)

 

[328dude]

550 Piston/ One forced landing after swallowing a valve over RVS in Tulsa.

2400 Turbine/ One forced landing due to propeller seperation in flight in a MU-2 outside HOU. Not exactly one of my more enjoyable evenings flying amoungst the birds. The airplane was eventually scraped.

 

[Flightist]

More Results!

I know you've all been on pins and needles waiting for the latest results from this poll, so here it is!

36 respondents that fit the criteria of listing both their total recip. time and # of forced landings or failures that would have resulted in a forced landing.

Total hours of those 36 people: 59,210.3 hrs.
Average piston hours of respondent:1644.73 hrs
Total failures: 28
Average number of hours/failure:2114.64hrs/failure

I wonder if I could get federal funding for this study? Kinda hard making it on CFI wages! If I continue having off-airport landings it could be hard to attract new students, better to think about other sources of income.

Thanks everyone!