Mooney 231 Down in LA (no Injuries)

[mooniac15u]

14 minutes ago, jkhirsch said:

So reporting an opinion of a completely unqualified source in addition to factual information provides some value to society?

The source was cited.  Decide for yourself whether it provides value.

In this case their source was wrong and they did the right thing which was to follow up with a better source and not just leave the original report out there without additional information.  Following the original link takes you to a nice brief write-up with the correct information.

[mooniac15u]

Just now, Mooneymite said:

I'm confused.  Is this thread about a Mooney off-field landing, or accuracy in the media?  

Thread drift never happens on MooneySpace.

[Browncbr1]

44 minutes ago, Yetti said:

quit arguing over the media.  Start arguing over the spark plug taking a cylinder out

I apologize for being distracted and losing focus on what really matters on MS... thanks for calling me out and keeping me in check...   looking forward to seeing EM data

[jkhirsch]

I don't care if they cite the source or not, there is no value to reporting speculation.

Every human on the face of the earth can speculate for themselves just fine.

'We have a report of a small plane down in a field near the Baton Rouge Airport, when we have more details we'll provide them for you.'

The 24 hour news cycle has thrived on bullshit speculation, they've programmed the public to desire that kind of reporting and it's disgusting.

It's more disgusting than this poor gentleman's spark plug breaking up in flight.

Edited March 31, 2017 by jkhirsch

[Bob_Belville]

29 minutes ago, mooniac15u said:

The source was cited.  Decide for yourself whether it provides value.

In this case their source was wrong and they did the right thing which was to follow up with a better source and not just leave the original report out there without additional information.  Following the original link takes you to a nice brief write-up with the correct information.

Actually, there is another real possibility. The reporter could have misunderstood the fire fighter who may have told him the engine was out of oil based on what the pilot had said. The reporter may of may not have heard "oil" correctly but it is not at all surprising that some minutes after the conversation he thought he heard fuel, a much more common cause of engine failure. Civilian eye witnesses are notoriously mistaken, even professionals like reporters and fire fighters are not immune. 

[Guest]

I just replaced a Tempest fire wire plug in a Cirrus engine due a cracked insulator.  This too was an issue with Champion plugs in SR22 turbocharged engines.  We replaced them all with Tempest, now they are having issues.

Clarence

[Yetti]

Could you elaborate on 'cracked plug?  How was it found?  How was it verified?

[Browncbr1]

58 minutes ago, M20Doc said:

I just replaced a Tempest fire wire plug in a Cirrus engine due a cracked insulator.  This too was an issue with Champion plugs in SR22 turbocharged engines.  We replaced them all with Tempest, now they are having issues.

Clarence

Is there a way to identify date of manufacture on the cracked plug?

[XXX]

My hangar neighbor had issues with his turbo Lance misfiring during climb and at altitude. He had two mechanics looking at everything from fuel system to mags and wires. After six months of finding nothing he called Zephyr and described the problem. They told him a plug was cracked. No luck finding the cracked plug with a magnifying glass but he replaced all the plugs and the problem is cured. The bad plug didn't show up during run-up.

[jkhirsch]

2 hours ago, Bob_Belville said:

Civilian eye witnesses are notoriously mistaken, even professionals like reporters and fire fighters are not immune. 

Exactly why it should not have been reported!

[thinwing]

4 hours ago, Browncbr1 said:

I wonder if the spark plug was mistakenly dropped before installation...   I'm sure that is what tempest will allege

The rule is "drop it once,drop it twice"..in the trash can that is !

[thinwing]

Also a detonation /preignition event from taking off with a ground leaned turbo will crack porcelain insulators.

[bonal]

Fantastic job pilot on a safe outcome and I love the part in the interview when he says we will keep flying this plane once we have a new engine installed.  48 years with this his first off field.  This guy should be a spokes person for GA.  And no offense to our heros out there but most firemen are not experts on aviation.  The media and most of the public think firemen know everything about everything.  I have lots of life long friends that are firemen and they know about fires and rescue and things specific to the job but like you and me they dont know about things outside of their expserience.

[flyboy0681]

6 hours ago, jkhirsch said:

Gotta differentiate between LA and Louisiana...I was expecting some sort of disastrous outcome in the middle of the densely populated metro area.

I fell for that too.

[DAVIDWH]

Back to that cracked insulator:

Common causes:

1. Torque wrench not calibrated as they should be on an annual basis.

2. Torque wrench not handled properly, ie, one hand over plug socket, one hand firmly on wrench handle.

3. Overtorquing,  (Just a little more) simple as that.

It doesn't take much, remember the old adage: " For the loss of a nail a shoe was lost, for the loss of a shoe a horse was lost,

for the loss of a horse a rider was lost and lastly, for the loss of a rider a kingdom (Mooney) was lost.

Moral of the story:

Don't text or drink coffee when installing fine wires.

PS: My landings are not that good on 5000 ft. runways.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Browncbr1 said:

Is there a way to identify date of manufacture on the cracked plug?

Not that I'm aware of.  The only way would be record keeping back to the batch or lot of manufacture.

Clarence

[mike_elliott]

4 hours ago, M20Doc said:

I just replaced a Tempest fire wire plug in a Cirrus engine due a cracked insulator.  This too was an issue with Champion plugs in SR22 turbocharged engines.  We replaced them all with Tempest, now they are having issues.

Clarence

no worries, they have a 'chute to pull....

[Bob_Belville]

35 minutes ago, DAVIDWH said:

Back to that cracked insulator:

Common causes:

1. Torque wrench not calibrated as they should be on an annual basis.

2. Torque wrench not handled properly, ie, one hand over plug socket, one hand firmly on wrench handle.

3. Overtorquing,  (Just a little more) simple as that.

It doesn't take much, remember the old adage: " For the loss of a nail a shoe was lost, for the loss of a shoe a horse was lost,

for the loss of a horse a rider was lost and lastly, for the loss of a rider a kingdom (Mooney) was lost.

Moral of the story:

Don't text or drink coffee when installing fine wires.

PS: My landings are not that good on 5000 ft. runways.

My torque wrench is from the avionics dept at Harbor freight and I check it every year before doing annual. Like other tasks that Lynn trusts me to do, I am concerned that I don't know what I don't know and try to be extra careful. R&R plugs is a simple looking process fraught with potential mistakes.

Having said that, I'm not sure that I think over torque the plug should crack the insulator all by itself. Perhaps overtightening the terminal nut...  

[Oldguy]

I have had a backfire crack the insulator on a plug on my 4x4 and could not find the problem until I pulled the plug and saw the insulator spin on the electrode.

I have been accused of being overly cautious, but after 1 plane crash, 1 regulator failure 125' underwater 600' from the cave entrance, and 1 motorcycle engine depart the frame and attempt to include my leg, I'll take the label of overly cautious and wear it proudly. All that is to say if I heard my J backfire, I would likely shutdown and check all the plugs before launching. Not intimating this happened in this case, but from experience, I am constantly amazed how fragile some of the components of our engines actually are.

And considering the land around Baton Rouge, finding a solid field and putting it down safely is about as good as it gets. My hat is off to the pilot.

[EricJ]

Sent the link to a friend to see whether this is the same Earl Douglas that was one of my instructors forty years ago.   Is he a dentist?    This might be very, very cool for me.

 

[Jimack]

2 hours ago, EricJ said:

Sent the link to a friend to see whether this is the same Earl Douglas that was one of my instructors forty years ago.   Is he a dentist?    This might be very, very cool for me.

 

Yes, Earl use to be a dentist.  I will message you his email address.

Edited March 31, 2017 by Jimack

[Cyril Gibb]

Am I mistaken here?  I think the smoking gun is the cylinder being replaced, not the cracked plug which required the cylinder to be replaced.  

[EricJ]

So I sent the vid link to a friend and confirmed that this is the same Earl Douglas that I knew.

I have to tell this story now, as it is very cool in many ways and completely true.

I was an Air Force brat and we lived in southern Germany when I was in High School.   There was a tiny Army Airfield just south of our housing area in Ludwigsburg that had an American flying club that had a few old Cessnas.   Most of the membership was Army helicopter pilots, primarily Vietnam vets (this was in the middle 70s), that wanted to get their fixed-wing license.  The field had a 2000' paved runway, three UH1s and two OH58s, plus a German flying club and a German glider club besides the American club.   Being a teenager crazy about airplanes I weaseled myself into being the lineboy and general gopher at the club, and got paid in instruction and flying time.   This is how I learned to fly.

The club usually had one full-time instructor that was a European national building time for an aviation career, and also a lot of additional part-time instructors that were various military personnel who had CFIs and wanted to instruct.   Our club president was a Lt. Col that worked at European Command who also instructed a lot, and Earl Douglas was an Army dentist at the time and also instructed frequently at the club.   I think I flew with every or nearly every instructor we had, and by the time I soloed on my 16th b-day I had 105 hours.   I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but by then they'd made me proficient at all the commercial maneuvers, gave me a lot of instrument training, and a lot of just other general but more advanced instruction, like spin training, because I was a bit of a joint project and they didn't know what else to do with me until I soloed.    It was every bit the awesome experience for a teenager that loved airplanes as it sounds.

We rotated back to the states before I turned 17 and moved back to my home town in South Dakota where I finished my license when I was 18.   I flew as much as I could (which wasn't all that much because I was poor) for the next ten years until I got out of college and moved to AZ.   Then life and career and everything else happened and I took a thirty-year break from flying, resuming last year when I got current again.   When I started flying again last year I dug out the logbooks and started recalling some of the many names of instructors whose autographs graced its pages and thought I'd look up a few.

This is where it started to get interesting.   I'd already decided to start looking for a Mooney as it fits my expected mission requirements and just generally appeals to me.

I discovered that the Lt. Col. that was our club president, who I flew with frequently forty years ago and who I got along with very well, lives ten minutes from me here in Scottsdale.  So we started having fairly regular lunch meetings.   It turns out he used to own an M20E, so he's been giving me all kinds of advice and guidance and has been helping me research candidate airplanes.   As part of all that he told me that Earl Douglas had helped him find his because they were both living on the east coast at the time and Dr. Douglas owned a J model at that time (which I think was the early 80s).

The lady who was our pilot examiner at the club in Ludwigsburg also had a home here in AZ, and I had gotten in touch with her when I moved down here after college and used to frequently hang out with her and her family until I moved back to SoDak for grad school, after which we kind of lost touch.   So, of course, recently I find out that she's still here (in her 70s now), flying her C210 and still working as an examiner.   Going to schedule a joint lunch with her and our old club president at some point before too long, I hope.

And then today I see this thing with Earl Douglas, who is, in fact, the same Earl Douglas that was one of my instructors at our funky little flying club in Germany when I was a teenager.   And he's still flying Mooneys, quite proficiently apparently.

This is just way too cool for me.

1 hour ago, Jimack said:

Yes, Earl use to be a dentist.  I will message you his email address.

Thanks a ton.   This should be fun.

 

 

[Tony Armour]

Great news, great landing !

I'll post up my issues with cracked insulators, the last one two weeks ago and a precautionary spiral to land from 11,000' to the nearest airport with a 500' ceiling 

[Dead Stick Douglas]

I made myself a new handle - "Dead Stick Douglas".  i didn't know i had that much skill, so realize that a lot of good luck and the hand of God were very vital to this incident.

i'd like to clear up some of the data points floating out there.  We topped the tanks off before departing Austin and our range with 75 gal usable is 0530.  Flight Aware shows our flight to have been 0230, so 0300 hours left, or enough gas to get to Atlantic Ocean.  The fuel in the tanks in the plane tell that story.  However, the words "oil" and "fuel" may have sounded similar and therefore the confusion to the reporters.  I did email the station and told them that fuel was not low - that would have been bad judgement, which we didn't have - but that oil was lost, which was bad luck, which we did have.  at least until we landed safely.

I don't know how the reporters declared that three people were in a crash when the fact was that two people were in one of the smoothest landings ever made and no one and nothing was scratched, save a little dent in a gear door that found a little dirt to rub on.

A little clarification on the reports of the engine are in order though.  Back in the fall, i reported an engine burp of a half second to my mechanic and he had not explanation.  the engine ran fine for two months until it went in for its annual inspection, at which time the broken plug and damage to the piston and cylinder was discovered.  I had requested that he replace the plugs with Tempest fine wires prior to the annual, but upon learning of the Tempest failure, told him to not use Tempest but instead put twice the price Champions in the plane instead, which he did.   So any reference to Tempest plugs is irrelevent relating to this incident.

As far as the cause of the engine issue, i have no idea.  i didn't know an engine could shake that hard and not break off the mount though, and still wonder how white smoke could come out the front of the cowling when air was entering it at 100K.  The engine seized just after coming out of the bottom of the clouds at 2,000' and looking through two prop blades standing still was quite unsettling.  Watching the glide slope start coming up off the bottom of the indication told me that i would be sinking down to it and then below it and decided that we couldn't make the runway from 2,000.  I saw a small green patch on the ground and dismissed it as too small to land in.  Looking all around I didn't see anything else that looked as good, so resigned myself to a very critical approach. 

The patch measured at 1,000' on Google Earth and 50' trees at each end.  I knew I couldn't be high or fast or we'd run into the trees at the other end.  we thought we would trim some trees on the approach but didn't and flipped up the speed brakes and landed, rolling pretty fast toward the trees at the other end and thought we would be running into them. 

But near the end of the field, the treeline on the right side of the field ended and i made a hard right turn toward that opening, expecting to dig in a wingtip, but we didn't even dip and the wide gear swung us around before getting to the trees.  then we stopped rolling and got out.

i'll let you all know what the engine issue was when it is taken to a hangar and the engine is replaced. 

Twenty responders arrived very soon.  The sheriff came up and said what a great job of flying it was.  A police helicopter landed and the pilot ran over to shake my hand and said he had never seen such airmanship.  Lots of compliments.  Then the mayor of Central (Louisiana) and five staff took us to lunch and gave us the keys to the city.  The owner of the property we landed on was as nice as could be and pulled the plane up to high ground so the coming rain wouldn't bog it down.

here's the field.  we landed to the right and took the "high speed taxiway" exit at the right end is where we ended up, right at the bottom of the image.  A lot of momentum to roll that far, but thankfully that gap in the treeline was there!