I almost set this to “private”, but it is time for me to write about it.
Picture this. You are flying home from work one day in the small private plane, a Beech Sierra, which you use to get back and forth to the main office for meetings—normally, you telecommute full-time from what some people refer to as “the boonies”. The plane has had somewhat recent major work, but has been running well for several months. In fact, you just returned from a transcontinental trip to the midwest with your family. It is a warm autumn afternoon.
You stop at an airport in a small town on the way to pick up a fellow pilot who also lives in your area. He has taken the local club plane to the mechanic’s shop for some work and you heard he needed a ride home, so you coordinated with him. You have never met him before, so after you take off and start your climb, the two of you trade a few stories and get to know each other a little bit.
Then you realize that that story about the big fan on the front of the airplane is true. It’s a fan to keep the pilot cooled off, because you can see him (or her) sweat when it stops.
The engine loses power rather abruptly and quits at an altitude of approximately 2200 feet above ground level. The propeller doesn’t actually stop—it windmills in the breeze—but after a few choice words, you and the other pilot snap into training mode and run through checklists together about what might be wrong with the engine and how to restart it, all while steering toward lower terrain and the nearest airport. Your path takes you over the airport at about 1200 feet, and you begin a wide arc to line up with the runway while making noises on the radio to the effect of “get out of the way”. (It sounds more professional at the time.)
As you complete the arc and start the landing checklist, still with no power, you realize that you are father away from the runway than you had planned (and hoped) to be. One contributing factor is that your landing gear are stuck partway down, which you did not know as there is no indication of such in the cockpit—the mechanic who watched you take off noticed it and tried to get you on the radio, but was unable to reach you. In any case, with no power and rapidly dropping altitude, you have a choice between the road, the river, and the vineyard in between (see photo link below). Roads have both cars and invisible power lines, and the river is just a trickle filled with rocks in the late fall, so the vineyard is Hobson’s choice.
Your co-pilot and you talk each other through the process, line up with the rows, and silently thank heaven that it is after 5pm and after harvest time, so there are no invisible personnel below tending the plants. As you reach the ground, everything goes suddenly very green, and you are thrown headlong against your seat belt while items from the back of the plane fly over your head and into the windscreen, which has filled with leaves.
Vineyards are set with trellis wires—large metal stakes every 15-20 feet, and thick steel wire in between—so the landing roll from stalling speed (about 68mph) to a full stop takes 55 feet, or about the length of a house. It seems to last forever, but actually takes 1.2 seconds, giving your body a backward acceleration of a relatively gentle 2.6Gs—better than a brick wall. You look at each other, open the doors, and step out.
The nosegear evidently broke off upon impact, and the propeller tips are curled backward just a little, since the engine was not making power at the time of impact. The right wing is bent at an awkward angle where it meets the plane, so your passenger has to disembark on your side. Neither of you is hurt, other than a scratch or two. There is a faint smell of aviation gasoline, so you quickly shut off all electric power to the plane, as well as shutting the fuel valve off.
A couple of guys have stopped a golf cart at the end of the row and are walking toward you. They had been doing restoration of the salmon habitats in the river nearby and heard the impact. As they walk toward you down the rows of vines, one of them recognizes your passenger—they went to high school together, but hadn’t seen each other in many years, a very strange coincidence.
First, you call your wives. Then you call the sheriff, FAA, NTSB, and insurance company. The fire department arrives, but finds that anything that was going to leak out of the plane had already done so and evaporated. After a few hours, everyone leaves, and a friendly sheriff gives you a ride to a place where you can rent a car to get home.
There are photos of this event if you’d like to look.
Aftermath: What caused the pump to fail? Good question.
According to the NTSB report, there was only 1 gallon of fuel left in the left tank. This is different from the report of the mechanic who removed the plane from the vineyard, who stated he removed a bit over 3 gallons from the tank. Both of these are low figures, but 3+ gallons will keep the engine going, and 1 gallon will not. No agency involved is really interested in finding out which figure is correct, because you are still breathing and walking around and they have other issues to attend.
The FAA has a friendly discussion with you on the nature of fuel management, congratulates you on a good emergency landing, and sends you on your way. NTSB, who is required to form an opinion in such cases, states that the most logical explanation is that you mismanaged the fuel somehow, though there is no penalty for this. In many cases, the penalty is paid by the pilot before NTSB arrives on the scene, so they, like the FAA, are relatively happy to be talking to you instead of to your loved ones.
The following winter, the mechanical fuel pump on your airplane is recalled [PDF] for conditions that “can result in restricted and/or loss of fuel flow”. The insurance company removes the fuel pump and ships it to NTSB, who disassembles it and finds no anomalies. They pass it on to the engine manufacturer, but you hear nothing else about it.
It is also noteworthy that the Sierra has an electric fuel boost pump for emergencies and cold starts. That pump moves fuel through the mechanical pump on the engine, so if the mechanical pump is blocked, no fuel will flow. Your memory of the exact events is hazy. You do not remember using the electric pump, but its switch was on when you returned to the plane after the accident, so you must have turned it on. You do not remember whether you switched tanks from the left to the right and back again, but you remember turning the fuel switch completely off before exiting the plane.
So, you could have been trying to pump fuel past a blocked pump, or you could have been trying to pump air into the engine.
From an objective standpoint, it seems most likely that you ran the left tank low and introduced air into the fuel line. This could have caused a vapor lock, or it could have exacerbated whatever problem may have pre-existed with the fuel pump. From a point of personal pride, you hope it was just the pump. However, no one other than you is even slightly interested in finding out whether you messed up or whether it was a mechanical difficulty, or both.
Perhaps that is a lesson in itself, and perhaps now, four and a half years later, you can think about giving up worrying over it.
