Bored on a weekday evening? You could do worse than tea, biscuits, and a CAA-partnered safety webinar. This one, run by Astral Aviation Consulting, was called Power Off, Brain On, and it's a title I'm stealing. The engine stopping, or stumbling, or just not sounding right, isn't the dangerous bit. What happens in the pilots head in the next thirty seconds is.
It seems the statistics say that complete engine failure is actually rare. What's more common is rough running, partial power loss, a hesitation that clears before you've finished being alarmed by it. 69% of the room had experienced rough running. Only a handful had had an engine actually die.
"Engine failures rarely kill pilots. Loss of control, delayed decisions and poor preparation do."
Choose a bucket
Mechanical, non-mechanical, or Fire, or possibly problems, each with their own drill.
Mechanical failure is the one everyone pictures, when something inside the engine physically breaks. A throttle cable disconnects on takeoff. An oil pressure sensor mod leaks unnoticed until the engine runs dry and seizes in flight. Both real accident reports, both flyable once the pilot accepted what was happening and flew the aircraft down under control.
Non-mechanical issue are the sneaky one, when nothing's wrong with the engine at all. It's fuel exhaustion (you didn't have enough) or fuel starvation (you had it, but it just wasn't reaching the engine). One case involved a dipstick borrowed from a different airframe, calibrated for neither. Another involved a four-tank Cherokee 6 and a pilot who forgot to switch tanks on schedule, serious injuries despite fuel still sitting in the wings.
Fire is the rarest and the one where hesitation costs most. Learn tyhe checklists. Identify, isolate and extinguish if safe. With a ground fire, keep cranking, suck the flames back through the induction system, then starve it, fuel off, mixture idle cut-off, master off, get out. In-flight fire, same starving instinct, then get on the ground now. There's no such thing as troubleshooting a fire in the air.
They actually named names
One thing that surprised me was how openly the panel discussed real incidents, named aircraft, real registrations, not the usual sanded-down "an aircraft in the south of England." They were upfront about why: not to point fingers or play the blame game, but so we can pull the actual accident report afterward and read it in their own time. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between a case study that feels abstract and one that feels like it happened to someone real.
Closer to Home
My own instructor's had to do this one for real, not with me, with another student, over-primed and cranking on the ground. He kept it running and sucked the flames back into the induction system rather than shutting down and letting them sit there, exactly what the checklist says to do. It's nice to hear the training works.
Jack's told me more than once I should be flying in a Nomex flight suit and leather flying gloves, mostly because he loves the look, but I get where the sensible half of that comes from. Fire doesn't negotiate with bare skin, and my useral garb of a T-shirt will not cut it. The gloves are a work in progress., but a full spitfire'esk flight suit feels like a lot of commitment for a 172.
"Contents, Balance, Consumption"
The fuel-check shorthand I'm stealing for my own flights. Not just "yep, fuel's fine," but contents, how much is actually there, balance, are both tanks feeding evenly, and consumption, does the burn rate match what my flight plan says it should.
I was taught early on never to trust the gauge, so contents means what a proper calibrated dipstick told me before departure, not a stick pulled off the nearest flower pot, (yes see it). and not the needle in flight either. PA-28s skip the dipstick argument entirely with over and under tabs inside the tank, a little metal marker like something off a lawnmower, so you know exactly where full-to-the-tab sits without guessing. Crude but it works. Balance is still watching that both tanks are feeding evenly, nothing pooling or leaking from one side. I still have a timer running reminding me to switch the tanks on a PA28. KK has a knob marked 'Both'.
Consumption is where the fuel flow meter earns its keep, It's also useful for tuning the lean. And underneath all of it, I fly with conservative reserves. I don't drain things to the last drop and I've no interest in finding out what "empty" really means.
Fact for the Day - Did you know oil has an expiry date? I didn't.
The bit that made me feel slightly better about myself
I've probably practised more PFLs and partial power losses than my hours would suggest, and it's not really discipline. It's Connor and Jack. Every time either of them gets in an aircraft with me, even when I'm buying the cake, there's a sneaky "let's just prepare you for something" moment waiting somewhere in the flight. Used to find it faintly annoying. Now I'm grateful for it. Turns out I've had two very patient, very persistent instructors drilling that into me for years.
Elstree from above
The webinar had me pull up Google Earth and look at the fields around Elstree with an EFATO mindset for the first time in a while. I'm not going to comment on the recent Amazon aircraft accident off the end of the runway, there were fatalities, and that deserves more respect than a line in a blog post. But every pilot who flies from anywhere should treat incidents like that as a wake-up call, not a headline to scroll past. What's actually available if the fan stops shortly after departure isn't a good look. Realistic choices: something that looks suspiciously like pylons, or a cemetery. Not great choices.
Parachutes aren't the answer to everything
The point that stuck from the BRS (Ballistic Recover Systems, aka aircraft parachutes) section was how conditional these systems actually are. They are not a universal saviour. You need height for one to work at all, and the moment you pull, you're no longer flying the outcome, you're along for the ride going wherever the parachute decides to take you. You are literally in the lap of the gods.
Parachute equipped aircraft get a bad press on aviation social media. or is is just the Cirrus range? The usual line is pilots pull at the slightest bleep of a warning light, real pilots land the thing. I get where the comments come from, but I get the value of the BRS system as well. Given the choice, I'd rather be arguing the point with the keyboard warriors on the ground after a successful deployment than found in a pile of wreckage because landing it myself seemed the more manly option.
The Last Questions
The webinar ended with a thought. What would you actually do if the engine stopped right now? Could you quote your aircraft's best glide speed without thinking? When did you last practise an EFATO, properly? Do you know your engine fire drill from memory, not the checklist?
We are all still learning, and this week for me, that meant an hour of slides that changed how I check my fuel, my oil, and the fields around my own aerodrome. Tea and biscuits well spent. Astral Aviation Consulting run these regularly, and the CAA's SkyWise service is worth subscribing to for the alerts that feed into them.
