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are u shooting to go to pt 121 like regional or airlines for job ? what do u do now for work ? are u also A&P ? know so much about ac engines!

@@phillp7777 It's a dedicated frequency and dedicated controller since there's so much direct communication with ATC.

@MalibuMikeCFII so is that normal for any ifr pilot ? never heard seen this ? how can atc afford to just talk to 1 pilot.. it's rly not bad imc either right ? what type atc service is this called ? airline guys don't even get this personal handling right ?

@@phillp7777 No a mag check does not reveal an occasional stuck valve. A stuck valve essentially shuts down one cylinder and can have drastic effects on engine power or completely remove power.

​@@MalibuMikeCFIIohh so thats bad.. not good if simple runup chk can't even catch this ? makes me even more nervous scared? flying '79 aeroclub piper warrior plane trying to learn get Ppl. so what can u rly do?

@@phillp7777 Early warning signs are a rough running engine right after startup and it sounds like that's what happened with this flight before they took off. They restarted the engine after they started to taxi. It's very hard to predict when you might lose power, but that's what we practice for. Running engines "brutally lean" on the ground is our best way to prevent this from happening. Study up from Mike Busch and his materials on the Savvy Aviation TH-cam channel.

@@Travis1Bickle I don't think so, especially because Richard was the one that made those videos for AOPA at the time and this one really impacted the pilot community a lot. 😥

Great to hear it helped! Whereabouts will you use this technique to make your flying easier?

@@MalibuMikeCFII I'm currently based at KSNC. I frequently fly to Va Beach (KCPK) but I've been up and down the East Coast. In-flight TFR avoidance is a snap with ForeFlight, however making it happen with my GTN-750xi was another story. I JUST had a Garmin Flight-Stream 510 card installed last week, so between that AND your helpful video I think that it's going to make things in the cockpit a WHOLE lot better. Thanks again, Mike!! Jay - N52MJ

@@jaym.9587 Yeah I've found that using ForeFlight to create custom waypoints doesn't necessarily upload correctly to the GTN 750 Xi. Often though, if you can find a fix that's "close enough", that's the easiest way to get the job done. But cutting precise edges around a class bravo airspace almost demands the native 750 Xi custom waypoints features here in this video. Stay in touch!

@@MalibuMikeCFII Looks like you are no stranger to GTN 750 Xi / iPad ForeFlight interaction. It's good to know that I might not have precise coordinate transfer from ForeFlight to the 750, I'll keep that in mind when I initiate a transfer. I just assumed that detailed coordinates would simply re-write from one device to the next. Can I expect the same "close enough" transfer going in the other direction (from the 750 to ForeFlight) as well? Also, do you have any experience with Garmin Pilot? If so, what do you prefer, and is the back and forth transfer(s) better (more accurate) than between ForeFlight and the 750? Thank you very much for your time, Mike!!! Jay

@@jaym.9587 I think it's easier to copy the waypoints from the GTN to ForeFlight. You should give it a try! I have the flightstream 210 and yours might work slightly differently. Honestly though foreflight is so much better than Garmin Pilot that it isn't worth switching over.

@@Beggaps Sure, maybe just put your email address in a comment and I'll copy it and then delete it?

That's correct, for the first 2-3 hours you want the engine to be run hard, so for one long flight or two short flights you want to run it really hard to seat the compression rings well. It shouldn't take any more time than that. I'm not sure how that relates to this video though.

Thanks for the encouragement!

Amen to that.

I couldn't disagree with you more. I think it's totally possible to balance respect to those that have passed away and their families and to simultaneously discuss any possible lessons we can learn right now to prevent the same thing from happening to anyone else. There are gobs and gobs of data available right now so the lessons to other pilots can begin now. We should not throw up a roadblock to learning just because someone passed away in an accident. If it were me that had passed away in an accident, I would hope others would immediately learn from my potential mistakes and bad decisions and not repeat them. Not only can we learn lessons immediately from accidents but we can also provide closure to people that are desperately seeking relevant and valid information about an accident. There is an extreme shortage of useful information in the media after these crashes. Being tactful about these events means not making hard assumptions or throwing blame anywhere, but having a careful balance of ranking the possible causes of the accident and thinking about how we can mitigate these circumstances or make different decisions in the future.

@@MalibuMikeCFII I agree its possible to do what you said in the first paragraph of your reply above. I just don't think Mike did it. He needs to think on how listening to what he says lands with those involved. You then said: Being tactful about these events means not making hard assumptions or throwing blame anywhere, but having a careful balance of ranking the possible causes of the accident and thinking about how we can mitigate these circumstances or make different decisions in the future Which is exactly my point, again Mike failed in this regard. Regards, Clive

@@englishclive This is me, I made the video. I disagree with your opinion. I have personally heard from people who are friends and family of the pilot and they appreciated and commented on my video thanking me for this. So yes, there are many conclusions we can make, and lessons we can learn right away, and closure we can have. If you want to be critical of any of my assertions, please call them out specifically instead of name-calling (e.g. "know-it-all remarks").

Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment. For many airports, and/or many airplanes, there is typically going to be a vulnerable minute or two for departures simply because the area might be heavily congested or as Richard himself demonstrated in his video publications (e.g. for high performant aircraft), the impossible turn is truly impossible. To make a blanket statement that unless people fly the way you do, they will suffer an off-airport landing, is a little far-reaching. For GA, the fatality rate in the U.S. has been hovering around 1 in 100,000 hours the past couple of decades. I tend to believe the bottom 5% of pilots weighs that statistic down; I want to be in the top 5% to be a couple more orders of magnitude safe. You are striving for the same thing. However, with modern-day engine monitors and subsequent data analysis capabilities, oil filters, and oil spectral analysis, under most circumstances, the engine will begin to show warning signs long before a catastrophic engine-out event occurs. It's up to the pilot/owner to make sure they are listening. Back 30 years ago, they would put a single EGT and single CHT (both analog and with no data recording) into an airplane engine -- insanely insufficient to catch any troublesome patterns. We now have oil analysis that will find microscopic wear particles that hint towards possible issues. If we find a super tiny shaving of ferrous metal in oil filters we can find out where it came from. We now have boroscopy that allows us to easily inspect the condition of cylinders, pistons and valves in ways we couldn't 30 years ago. We also know more about these engines now than we did 75 years ago. Good pilots will operate their engines to not exceed certain temperature standards to prevent stacking the deck against themselves and their engine. Engines will usually give warning signs before they go kaput, and we just need to listen. Further, the new Advisory Circular 90-66C recommends to exit and enter the pattern AT traffic pattern altitude since otherwise it's too easy to descend and collide with another airplane in the pattern. Did you ever consider that maybe you are replacing engine-out risk with mid-air collision risk by enacting these practices? You certainly can't claim it's non-zero for hanging out right above an airport near the traffic pattern altitude for an extra amount of time! How many near misses have you had in 40 years?

@@MalibuMikeCFII As for near misses, I have had several. Descending down into the pattern is not illegal, and was actually done during my training. My instructor learned to fly in WW2, when engines were not so reliable and he taught me many things you will not find in the manuals. As for mid air in the traffic pattern, have you ever done an overhead entry? From 3,000 agl, you can see the entire pattern and who is in it. I myself, had rather take my chances with my overhead entry, than an engine failure over a congested city at low altitude.I also prefer climbing to 3,000 agl before turning downwind on windy days to ensure I can get back if the engine quits. If you are one of those who take an immediate turn to course, you may very well have given up any chance of return. On my first engine failure, had I been downwind of the airport when it occurred, I would not have made it back as the wind was gusting to 20 that day.

​@@ConvairDart106 I strongly recommend following the new Advisory Circular 90-66C (www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC_90-66C.pdf) which advises entry at the pattern altitude. The FAA has apparently done a lot of research over the past 30 years and is trying to put a stop to mid-air collisions with this new advice. It's easier to see airplanes at your same altitude than it is to see them 1000 feet below your altitude. Also, it seems like you are quite fixated on returning to the airport. There are many successful off-field landings all the time that we don't hear about because they don't become a statistic, as long as they don't stall the airplane before landing. I am suggesting there's a strong chance that your techniques are over-correcting out of fear of landing in a field somewhere. We all should prepare for where to put the airplane down if we have an engine failure at 400' AGL, and nearly every airplane needs to strategize for that, since it's likely too high to land on the remaining portions of most runways but too low to complete a turn back to the airport. The techniques I like to employ are keeping the airplane continuously within glide distance from the airport while flying a pattern wherever possible, and keeping sharp on my power-off 180 precision landings.

@@MalibuMikeCFII No, you misunderstood my first post. I said I climb until I know I can make the next suitable landing area, and am always looking around for the next suitable area as I go. Also, I am now flying an experimental airplane with a non certificated engine, which has made me even more wary than ever. Take an ILS for instance, or pomola. If you are using either for approach and the engine quits, you are unlikely to make the threshold. I live in western Washington which is heavily forested, and my father was killed flying into trees spotting salmon in Alaska back in 1967. I refuse to let the FAA force me into flying low over trees, or any other dangerous terrain. We would not even be having this conversation had Mr. McSpadden not departed the airport environment at 400 feet! Had he waited until reaching 1,000 feet, he would still be alive. He was betting everything on his engine! He and I have had our disagreements on other subjects before, but had he survived, he would most likely agree, that altitude is life! I had rather have to shed excess altitude, than be forced to stretch a glide!

@@ConvairDart106 I personally don't know of any CFI that recommends you always assume an engine failure is coming and VCOA until at a safe distance to glide somewhere. That seems like a severe overreaction and introduces more mid-air collision risks (mid-airs are almost always fatal) whereas landing on a road or a field is rarely fatal. Like you pointed out, ILS procedures with a 3 degree glideslope assume you have power otherwise you will definitely not make the airport. There are many tradeoffs regarding risks in aviation that we have to learn to live with. Often the least risky thing to do is stay at home and not travel anywhere because you could get into a fatal car accident even at 30 mph. We can't live like that, though! Humans are inherently terrible at estimating risk. Some will happily cross mountains but be very sheepish thinking about crossing Lake Michigan. What about relatively flat places in PA for example that don't have roads anywhere nearby, and the clouds force you to fly at 3,000? Again, if all we did was waited for clear skies, unlimited visibilities, and climbed to 5,000 feet above an airport before going anywhere, that's no way to fly in my opinion.

Feet per minute is not the same as feet per nautical mile. If you're climbing at 600 feet per minute but flying 180 knots over the ground, that's only 200 feet per nautical mile. Climb gradients are specified in feet per nautical mile because that's directly convertible to the climb angle whereas FPM isn't, since then you also need to know the ground speed. Feet per nautical mile is the climb rate (in feet per minute) multiplied by 60 then divided by the ground speed in knots.

@@MalibuMikeCFII I must have misheard. I thought you said 355 FPM. I understand the difference. Either way, my math says the plane was capable of flying the departure procedure. He needed 456 fpnm to 6700. Vx for a 140 is 68kts, Vy is 78 knots. At Vx, he should have been able to achieve pretty close to 500fpnm. Even at Vy, he would likely have cleared any obstacles. I just don’t see anything in the data given that shows climb performance has any bearing on what happened. It was not high DA. The plane was capable of flying the DP, even though there was no legal requirement to do so. This was spatial disorientation. You can see the signature descending spiral starting…

Sorry for the confusion. 355 FPM when flying approx 80 knots (IAS) and then adjusted for ground speed at a relatively high density airport is like doing almost 90 knots (TAS) so roughly you're traveling 1.5 miles per minute so divide 355 by 1.5 to get 236 feet per nautical mile. That is just over half of the requirement (456' per NM) to make an IFR departure from runway 21. Definitely severely risky business. However if the airplane had the engine upgrade as many are speculating, it would have made it less severe of a risk but still a moderately risky departure and that's only if everything goes exactly as planned. Unfortunately in these types of accidents there are often multiple links in the casual chain of events that doom a flight; spatial disorientation via somatogravic illusion was the dagger here as you said.

@@MalibuMikeCFII you’re getting pretty deep in the weeds. Of course, if he ignored the POH and flew different speeds, or there was a big tailwind, or whatever - he couldn’t make the DP fpnm. But, the plane was likely capable of doing so. Given the actual weather that day, the DA was about 5300’ and at 68 indicated, TAS about 75. Winds were 11kts from 320. So he was turning into a tailwind. Yet again, his climb performance had zero bearing on this accident. The plane, if configured within POH parameters, was 100% capable of out climbing the terrain. The DP isn’t relevant. Thousands upon thousands of planes depart safely every day from airports where they couldn’t possibly meet the DP requirements. If he had smacked a cliff 5 miles away, I think it would be relevant to discuss, but he didn’t. He entered a descending spiral at the turn to down wind. Climb performance just has nothing to do with this one

@@ragedracer1977 VFR at night into a black hole is, for all intents and purposes, IFR. If you can't see the terrain to avoid, you should be following the departure procedure. Could he have pulled this off in the day? Like I said in my video it would probably be a nail biter. At max gross, 355fpm at almost 90 KTAS is very sluggish performance. If it hadn't been so heavily loaded (keep in mind we don't know if it's overloaded for sure yet) and it had better climb performance, the accident might not have happened. So the sluggish performance of the climb at night was certainly a contributing factor to him being so close to the ground in the first place.

Did the valve stick open far enough this time where the piston snapped it in half?

That was our company A&P's assessment. I forgot to mention the other pilot did manage a safe dead-stick landing in night IFR (well above approach minimums for the ILS 10, but still impressive). Apparently no one told him before accepting the assignment that an emergency landing under partial power had been made only 12 hours prior. I really think your suggestion of stuck valve scenario seems the most likely given the information currently available.

Yeah, but that doesn't make for a provocative YT analysis video does it? Gotta pimp the mystery. This stuck valve nonsense is just laughably speculative and unsupported with ANY evidence.

Great data point. Thanks for sharing!

Sorry to hear this impacted you personally so much from directly observing this. It pains me to see so many crashes where pilots overlook easier places to land while hoping they can make it back to the airport without a scratch on the airplane. A life is worth so much more than an airplane!

@MalibuMikeCFII in your experience what is the general rate of speed/altitude in an engine failure? Was he over estimating the plane glide ability or was his decrease rate considered abnormal? 60 mph in 10 seconds doesn't give you much problem solving time. The wasatch front is grossly populated.. he really only had a couple options and. A short amount of time to decide it seems. Hard to judge a man's ability to perform under panic/stress as well as computer his options at such a decrease of air speed. Hind sight is 20/20 so to speak. None the less tragic.

@@Alixxusa it's almost impossible to say and varies based on how much power is lost and whether the propeller is windmilling or stopped, and also if it's a constant speed prop if the lever is full aft which can increase glide performance by 20-40%. By the looks of this accident it looks like partial power was still available at least at some point.

Losing one cylinder is absolutely not a 25% power loss. This is not a mathematics equation. In a 4 cylinder it means you have almost no power at all. This is primarily because there is now a gap and asymmetry in the power production of the engine that the other 3 cylinders cannot overcome. You don't have to look far into examples of valve failures in 4 cylinder engines to verify this. In a normally operating 4 cylinder 4 stroke (suck, squeeze, boom, blow) engine, the cylinders take turns making power. When one cylinder takes a vacation, imagine a tug of war rope where nobody's holding the rope for 1/4th of the time. It's not hard to imagine the other team winning no matter how strong the other 3 people are.

I'm not an engineer and don't pretend to be. I'm not convinced you are either. I had a dead cylinder on an O320 from a broken ring and oil fouled plug. It flew although not great. I'm sure you're going to say the plug was still firing. I had a dead cylinder on a R985 which still put out power. Yeah, I had eight others. I'm not going any further with this. cheers! @@MalibuMikeCFII

A broken ring is a problem but is probably not going to severely affect cylinder compression unless it shatters. An oil fouled plug might cause the engine to run rough during a mag check (when the fouled plug is selected) but you still have one other good spark plug in the cylinder (there are 2 per cylinder). I encourage you to watch webinars from Mike Busch (most respected A&P/IA in the world AFAIK) on the Savvy Aviation youtube channel to help form a better foundational base of your theory of engines. There you will uncover a popular quote of Mike's that if you lose a cylinder in a 4-cylinder engine, you'll have to put it down in a field, but if you lose a cylinder in a 6-cylinder engine, you'll just have to change your underwear after making it to the nearest airport.@@scottw5315

Contrary to evidence in the NTSB report.

Not a chance. That plane was seeing basically continuous use, so it wasn't accumulating condensation in the tanks. And no other aircraft seem to have experienced any fuel-related issues. Did you just spit out the first random thought that came into your head?

We're not sure why they restarted their engine. If I had experienced engine roughness right after starting up, depending on the severity and assuming I noticed it, I would have cancelled. We do need to raise awareness of what morning sickness is for engines and ensure people are aware of how it's an early warning sign. But again, we don't know if this is what they experienced in the flight that prompted them to restart their engine on the ground. I hope the NTSB can definitively figure it out.

Mike, I feel honored you answered my comment. After many years of Flying little airplanes , I feel so confident that if I were taxing an airplane to the run up area and the engine quit through no fault of my own. I would have run the airplane back. to the FBO and I would not fly it until they figured out what was wrong with it, and could assure me that it would not happen again. Most of the time it’s so easy to do armchair quarterbacking, but in this case, I hope you and I know that airplane in our hands would not have been flown on that day. Thank you for all your good work. Mort.

@@mortonrobinson6408 Again, we don't even know if the engine quit on them. They might have been spooked by something, maybe a rough running symptom, and decided to see if it would replicate if they shut it down and restarted it. Hard to say though.

It is indeed hard to say. The unnecessary loss of two very kind beautiful men makes me weep. My heart breaks for the misery. Their families are going through. “😊What to do”.

I explained this in the video. A stuck valve doesn't necessarily result in a damaged cylinder nor permanent loss of compression. It can un-stick after the engine cools off. There are ways, though, to ascertain the probability of a stuck valve by performing the Lycoming wobble test that the manufacturer outlines.