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[78bex]

Please be aware that the video is over 30 mins long, you have been warned   

It was reported on the news & in the papers

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBpqvPujZgM

[Kevin Wood]

Very interesting insight into what goes on in the mind of a warbird pilot.

[Rods2]

Very interesting analysis. "keep flying the aircraft" was a key phase along with "canopy open" to stop being trapped, "turn away from the airfield" when he realised he wasn't going to make it and finally "gear up" to stop it flipping and "flaps down" to lose as much energy before hitting terra firma. It also shows when under maximum stress the mistakes he kicked himself from making by not following standard procedure of jettisoning the canopy but also the potentially more dangerous one in case the engine restarted on the final moments of flight by not turning the magnetos off.

All landings you walk away from are good landings.

Trying to reach the airfield was a mistake that Charlie Church made and sadly paid with his life when he tried to reach Blackbushe airfield when he had an engine failure in his Spitfire. He tried to land from the west and had to fly over a pine forest before the runway and came down in the trees.

[Kevin Wood]

Whilst, as a glider pilot, launch failures and running out of height followed often by a field landing (and sometimes not a survivable one for the aircraft) are something we train for, I hadn't considered the prospect of an engine that's playing up but not 100% failed and the mental tricks that clearly plays on you. Generally, once the rope has broken, it isn't going to knot itself together again!

I can see how that scenario can well entice you into leaving the relative safety of a good field you've selected with plenty of time into "get-home-itis", and then stab you in the back. I'm not sure if he had already selected that field as a possibility were he not able to make the airfield, and whether he'd have ventured back to the airfield if it was surrounded by forest, but it looked to me like he chose it pretty late, only just made it across the boundary to the field and, had he been at Blackbush, he might have been in the same place Charles Church found himself.

On the other hand, ditching a historic aircraft when there's maybe even the slightest prospect of saving it given enough power would have played on the mind too.

The fact that a 27 litre V12 carried on windmilling on the prop was an eye opener to me. That in itself was losing him a lot of energy!

I guess nobody walks away from a situation like that thinking they did everything right. The important thing is walking away at all - that you didn't do anything catastrophically wrong.

[Rods2]

Whilst, as a glider pilot, launch failures and running out of height followed often by a field landing (and sometimes not a survivable one for the aircraft) are something we train for, I hadn't considered the prospect of an engine that's playing up but not 100% failed and the mental tricks that clearly plays on you. Generally, once the rope has broken, it isn't going to knot itself together again!

I can see how that scenario can well entice you into leaving the relative safety of a good field you've selected with plenty of time into "get-home-itis", and then stab you in the back. I'm not sure if he had already selected that field as a possibility were he not able to make the airfield, and whether he'd have ventured back to the airfield if it was surrounded by forest, but it looked to me like he chose it pretty late, only just made it across the boundary to the field and, had he been at Blackbush, he might have been in the same place Charles Church found himself.

On the other hand, ditching a historic aircraft when there's maybe even the slightest prospect of saving it given enough power would have played on the mind too.

The fact that a 27 litre V12 carried on windmilling on the prop was an eye opener to me. That in itself was losing him a lot of energy!

I guess nobody walks away from a situation like that thinking they did everything right. The important thing is walking away at all - that you didn't do anything catastrophically wrong.

In his debrief he does acknowledge how much more dangerous the intermittent fault was where it is enticing him to attempt an airfield landing, whereas a straight engine failure would have you concentrating on choosing your best field.

Yes I agree, reduction gear loses and 27l of 12 cylinder friction is not insignificant, but the inverse is that you want the powered propeller to move as much air as efficiently as possible.

[Kevin Wood]

Yes I agree, reduction gear loses and 27l of 12 cylinder friction is not insignificant, but the inverse is that you want the powered propeller to move as much air as efficiently as possible.

I guess it's a fairly basic constant speed prop (in fact, you can hear it respond each time the engine picks up where the RPM rises above the set power then the engine gets loaded up by the prop and it drops), so it would have reacted to falling RPM by reducing the pitch - exactly what you don't want to reduce the drag!