Well I just experienced my first in flight failure tonight. I was flying with my instructor on my last flight before my instrument checkride. We were in IMC at night, en route to a fix to do some holding. Approaching the fix the DG failed. I flew using the standby instruments while my CFI did some troubleshooting. He rebooted the G1000 and did some mucking about with the circuit breakers but it didn't fix it. About 10 minutes later, the DG came back for a few minutes, and then it was off and on throughout the rest of the flight. Now I know this was really no big deal, but it wasn't too comforting logging my first actual night IMC and seeing a giant red X appear in front of me. It was pretty good partial panel practice though! (Actually, we were planning on doing partial panel work anyways, so it worked out nicely.)

Then while getting vectored for an approach, our pitot-static instruments started acting up. Nothing major, but occasionally they were behaving erratically. We turned on alt. static for a few minutes and switched it back and that problem seemed to correct itself.

One more problem made things interesting this evening. Shooting a GPS approach, I reduced throttle to descend and we felt the engine sputter. Immediately I put the throttle back to where it was and the engine went back to normal. I was hesitant to further reduce power, but my CFI assured me that it was okay. Anyways, we shot the approach, went missed at LPV minimums, and started our climb back outbound for the next approach. As we were climbing the engine started running rough. Then we felt/heard the sputter again and we decided to call it quits. My CFI took the flight controls, pulled a quick 180 and kept a high approach just in case. We landed and that aircraft is going straight to maintenance in the morning.

I know that my little experience tonight is really no big deal, especially compared to what I'm sure some of you guys have been through. Share any stories about failures, rough running engines etc..

Wow sounds interesting!!!!


I had Radio failure going into one of the businest cargo airports in the United States, but I just plugged into com2 and got down without too much of a problem, if thing go quiet for too long on the radio there might be a problem haha

Have a good week

Sorry but what's a DG? I hate how every thing is abbreviated. So confusing! Weird how all those things were stuffing up at the same time, especially scary about the engines!

A teacher I had in one of my classes had an extremely serious in flight failure. He was flying to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, Australia. I think he was piloting a small twin engine aircraft with a passenger, at night. Without any warning every electrical device just failed. All the lights went out, radios stopped working, navigation equipment failed, everything. All he had still working was the engines and the control surfaces. He couldn't see any of the instruments. If any of you have flown over the Northern Territory at night, you realise how much you need your instruments. I flew Cairns to Darwin during the night and after leaving Cairns I didn't see anything what so ever until about two minutes before arriving in Darwin. Anyway, he just kept on flying until he saw a glow in the distance, which was Alice Springs. He made the approach with no landing lights on, so ATC had no idea he was landing. He landed the plane safely and just as he turned off the runway, an Ansett 727 came roaring past on takeoff, just missing his aircraft. His plane wasn't seen until he was well onto the taxiway!

Dash,

Directional Gyro.

And now that was scary! Total electrical failure at night for sure mustn't be a lot of fun...


Any icing conditions that could have both plugged the pressure-based instruments and caused some carb icing?

That reminds me of a flight we did, I lhink it's when we filmed that video. When I was in the red plane we were having a little engine stuttering once in a while and the pilot was getting a tad worried - he called my friend in the Cricri on the radio and told him that - friend answered "oh don't worry I'm getting that too, as it's cold it's some ice forming on the carbs and once in a while it gets unstuck and sucked in - just always keep enough power so it doesn't get plugged and you're good!" Note both planes use small 2-stroke engines.
I was laughing at the different attitude of both, the pilot of the red plane is quite experienced but mostly in that plane (it's awful to fly as an "outsider", there's play and resistance in the controls, flying a straight line with that thing is a nightmare as it responds so weirdly, but he's so used to it with hundreds of hours that he automatically compensates for all the imperfections and you don't feel any of them as a pax), and not very knowledgeable about the technical side of things (he's the one who once told me in flight with a decent wind coming from our left not to turn right because it could tip us over if we lifted the left wing and the wind hit it from the underside... WTF?! I instantly understood it was better not to start aguing and say "oh OK"... but we did have a very good laugh with other friends over that after it though ) - while my friend in the cricri is a very experienced mechanic who will feel or hear the slightest abnormality long before an instrument would show it, know exactly what is causing it straight away and what to be careful about as a result...

A total electrical system failure would scare the s*** out of me. That's good that he was able to find the airport though.




Nah, we were in a C172SP, which is fuel injected. My CFI is also an A&P mechanic for our FBO, and he said that it may have been caused by the air filter being soaked because it had been raining all day and it was raining last night. But he also said that it shouldn't cause the engine to sputter like that, so something is definitely up. I'll let you guys know what he finds.

Glad it wasn't, but it could have been. I would only question your instructor's decision to continue the training when the "links in the chain" started to add up...

I've had during my seventeen year career six complete electrical failures. Two at night, but only one in solid IMC. Fortunately, my target field was still VFR. Not sure if I would have made it without a flashlight, nor prevented damage to the plane without knowing the manual gear extension procedure by heart. It was a black hole out there in central Texas...

My most recent issue was a failed gear-pump just after takeoff on Aug 27. I heard a loud "squealing" sound while raising the gear. I knew it wasn't right, but waited to assess it once at a safe altitude. Still on an IFR flight plan and turning on course, I informed ATC that I had a gear problem. They cleared me to maintain course and altitude to address it. That gave me the time and (more importantly) airspace to solve the problem (read above).

I had to fill out a report with the good fire and rescue folks, but didn't scratch the plane one bit...

Shoot! I get a lot of guffaws when I get on one of my rants and write a lengthy response to a question or ramble on with an opinion ... now, if I were to list the "in-flight failures" I've experienced, I'd get at least the guffaws, and if I were to explain them to any degree, my post would be so long that I'd likely be asked to leave the forum....

Come to think of it ... THAT just may be why a lot of guys just prefer not to fly with me any more!

I've been lucky. In all the years that I've been flying I've never had an inflight engine shutdown. Not one. I did lose an engine at the start of a takeoff roll in San Diego about 25 years or so ago. I've had one hydraulic failure that lead to a declared emergency, a cargo door left open in a B-727 that lead to big fuel dump, a weird vibration that lead to 4 days in Wichita (not fun) and a couple of lightening strikes that scared the hell out of me. Oh, and I actually took an airplane with a coffee pot that didn't work a couple of months ago. Biggest mistake of my career.

I thought you were a responsible and professional pilot!!! How could you possibly go with no coffee! - you ought to be ashamed of yourself, I suppose you are going to say next, you forgot cakes too!?!?! Really, I, I, I really, don`t know what to say. . . .

Once I had one of the cylinders crack, no apparent prob, except that this crack let out a lot of heat which melted the HT lead and that shorted the power to the plug so we were running on 3 pots. The vibration was notable and to increase power was not possible and the vib would have shuck the aircraft apart. With the power invested in me by the State of Panic, we could either just maintain alt or descend - so I did all the drills which seemed to come out all automatically - uncanny, like someone else doing it. Did all the checks, internal, made a gallant aim for an airfield which was a mile or so away - so came to pass a load of: time / speed / distance calculations . . the hero would get it in. . Meanwhile, back in the world of sane and normal people, my student (who is now a brillinat pilot) pointed out to me that we were in fact left base to a tiny little airfield (that we frequently used, and nice quiet place in the calm of the summer`s evening, here, in England - ahhh,)
Anyway, we turned finals and landed - with obviously no option for a go around, but who cares, Glider pilots do that all the time! It just goes to show, the if ALL of the engine out procedure was followed to the letter then I too would have seen the little airfield that we were already at.....hmmmm. Low Time Student 5 ---- Ace of the Base Sky King 0

You are a pair of brave souls!

Yeah well actually I just wanted to get on the ground ASAP, but my CFI was acting like it wasn't a huge deal. Looking back on it, I probably should've spoken up. But at least we made it.

Had a #3 in a Herc go wonky and shed parts of it's atanomy after it was hit by something. A B72 #1 sucked up a goose or some kind of flying thing going into Somewhere, Canadia...eh. Lost pressure once when a valve decided to take some time off at altitude a bunch of years ago. Nothing terribly interesting...and I really like it that way.