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Dawn Patrol said..Ian K said..According to the guys on the prune forum if you fly a King air straight and level it will climb on one engine. Turning adds drag, windsurfers know that. Can't afford to do anything draggy with one engine. It looks like you can fly for 28 years and only have one EFATO. All these pilots offering opinions while secretly wondering about how well they'd deal with one if it ever happened. Not an aviator myself but have spoken to plenty of pilots in pubs around the country. I've heard you're better off in a single than a twin, half the chance of engine failure. You might as well jump to 4 engines from a single, at least most fly OK with 75% power.
www.pprune.org/pacific-general-aviation-questions/591237-king-air-down-essendon.html I'd probably still rather a twin!
It is interesting though. A very rare event that everyone trains for but rarely unexpectedly and almost never experiences for real.
One reason why the Hudson landing was so spectacular. To keep calm under immense pressure very suddenly, when the last 30 years doing the same task have been very relaxed.
Long ago in a galaxy far away, well,..right here on planet earth actually, and around the 1960's, it was part of the normal twin endorsement that you had to practice for an engine failure soon after take off. If you crashed or had to be rescued by the instructor then you did not get the endorsement.
Some years after this it became obvious that there were far more fatal plane crashes from pilots learning and practicing this procedure than were ever likely to occur from the actual event, because engine failures are now not at all common.
So, they did the smart thing and removed the procedure from the training schedule.
Part of the reasoning was that since the event was so rare, whatever training the pilot did for it was so long ago that it was very rusty and out of practice if the real event actually happened.
Thus the training was considered unacceptably dangerous in itself and probably of little use if and when it was actually needed.
I don't think any pilots now do actual engine out on take-off with twins in real life.
They can obviously do it in flight simulators however and probably do.
More recently, training for engine failures are carried out at a safe altitude, where there is enough room to make a mess of it and have enough altitude to patch up the mistake. The idea is then to apply this to the low level situation if ever it occurs.
Thus, there is still the occasional accident when a real engine-out on take-off does occur and quite often it results in a serious accident, usually fatal. However, it is far from certain that any form of training would alter the situation unless it was very recent and ongoing. There were still fatalities from engine-out on take offs even when the training was being done, so it was in
no way an insurance against a bad outcome.
As far as I know, almost all twin engine aircraft made in the last 60 years will actually climb out on one engine, although it will be at a very low climb rate. They have to be able to do this to get certification. The Beechcraft King air is no exception and being a turbo prop, should climb out reasonably well on one engine so long as everything was done correctly in the short time available to assess and act.
The reason why many of them fail to do this in real life is that the aircraft has to be set up exactly right to achieve this.
The configuration of the aircraft is very different between climb out on full power with both engines running, and level flight on only one engine with the dead engine dragging the plane off in that direction.
There is a very specific and narrow speed range, flap setting, attitude with prop feathered etc etc, as well as identifying and then shutting down and isolating the defunct engine, and this is often not done properly due to the time restraints dictated by the low altitude at which the onset of trouble occurred. It is very easy to let just one critical parameter run out of range while being occupied looking for the best option to get back on the ground safely.
It can cost a few hundred feet to set things up perfectly, and soon after take off, you do not have that available.
Consequently the accidents continue.
All this is assuming the aircraft was not incapacitated in any way.
The report did say it suffered a catastrophic engine failure, which usually means bits flew out of the engine and went somewhere else. If that was a turbine blade or blades, they eject with very high momentums and can cause serious damage to critical components. We will have to wait for the report to see what the actual situation was.
A lot of the early twins, such as the DeHavilland Dragon would not climb on one engine, so if an engine failed in one of those, you were coming down, even though it be at a lower rate than with both engines on idle. In fact, they wouldn't even maintain level flight on one engine if it was fully loaded. If an engine conked out, you looked for a landing area, any landing area, and hoped you could get that far. In that respect the twin engines did nothing for the safety aspect other than to make a forced landing due to engine failure twice as likely.
southace
> 9 months ago, 21 Feb 2017
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