Is engine failure a real concern?

[PTK]

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• Bugs!!
  

[GeorgePerry]

My opinion only but - The vast majority of engine issues are a result of contaminated fuel or fuel exhaustion.  Outright mechanical failures are very rare, esp if an owner uses one of the reputable oil analysis companies.

Keep your Mooney in a hanger, keep the water out of the tanks, send oil off for analysis, and don't push your reserves.  Follow those simple rules and it'll proclude about 90% of the failures you hear about.

[PTK]

Quote: GeorgePerry

My opinion only but - The vast majority of engine issues are a result of contaminated fuel or fuel exhaustion.  Outright mechanical failures are very rare, esp if an owner uses one of the reputable oil analysis companies.

Keep your Mooney in a hanger, keep the water out of the tanks, send oil off for analysis, and don't push your reserves.  Follow those simple rules and it'll proclude about 90% of the failures you hear about.

[jetdriven]

Gearge is right.  Something like 90% of engine failures are fuel exhaustion or fuel starvation.  

Quote: GeorgePerry

My opinion only but - The vast majority of engine issues are a result of contaminated fuel or fuel exhaustion.  Outright mechanical failures are very rare, esp if an owner uses one of the reputable oil analysis companies.

Keep your Mooney in a hanger, keep the water out of the tanks, send oil off for analysis, and don't push your reserves.  Follow those simple rules and it'll proclude about 90% of the failures you hear about.

[jlunseth]

I posted on a thread a couple of months back about the Nall report.  It has detailed statistics breaking down accidents by cause (including mechanical failure or dumb pilot).  I will leave it to the rest of you to go through the report for yourself if you want.  I came away with a couple of conclusions.  First, while there were mechanical failure accidents, the overwhelming majority were in home-built aircraft.  There were so many that it is a little difficult at first look to understand why GA aircraft keep failing.  It is because home-built aircraft keep failing in fairly large numbers.  The mechanical failures in type-certificated aircraft are small.

Further, failures of type-certificated aircraft in cruise are tiny in number.  Most failures are in takeoff mode, with some in landing mode.  That is not much consolation of course, because we are most vulnerable in takeoff mode, and almost as vulnerable in landing mode. 

Compared to the numbers of accidents caused by pilot error, fuel exhaustion, weather conditions, the number of mechanical failures by type-certificated aircraft are so few as to make it hardly worth considering in terms of managing risk during flight.  For example, we had a thread earlier about "tight" landing patterns, which are advocated "in case the engine fails."  The risk that a pilot flying in a tight pattern will put the aircraft in an unrecoverable stall are about 20 times as great as that the engine will fail.  So if you want to reduce your risk in landing, change your pattern, forget about engine failure, and think about flying wide enough that you don't get pushed into tight, low speed turns.

The same can be said for just about every other phase of flight.

Of course, it is also no consolation to a pilot whose engine does fail, that the risk of it failing was small.  But it is not worth nearly the amount of thought that we give it.