AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019 - 100

P&E

NEVER AGAIN

I do declare
'Mayday' as a stress-reduction technique
BY PIERRE WILDMAN

100 | AOPA PILOT November 2019

over me. Beyond that selfish reasoning, I also
essentially deceived ATC by letting them
believe my airplane could perform like a
normal aircraft of its type, when in fact I was
already getting all I could from my wounded
bird. I vowed if it ever came up again I would
make ATC part of my team.
The second one-engine-inoperative
landing happened recently in a Cessna
414A. While transitioning for the approach
I noticed the left manifold pressure was not
decreasing as I pulled back the throttles. I
played around with throttle, rpm, and mixture controls to evaluate what I was dealing
with. I concluded that I had no control over
the throttle, and I had one power setting
available on that engine, which was about
25 inches of manifold pressure.
Ordinarily you'd think having partial power is better than no power. For the
moment that was so, but as I was intercepting the final approach course I started
thinking about the landing. I'd never landed
an airplane with nearly cruise power on one

PIERRE WILDMAN is an airline transport pilot

living in Danville, California.

SARAH HANSON

I RECENTLY MADE A RARE one-engine-inoperative (aka engine-out) landing. In thousands
of hours of flying twin-engine airplanes this
was only the second time. The first time,
many years ago in a Piper Seneca II, I did a
precautionary shutdown because a propeller
deice boot was separating from the blade. I
was getting VFR flight following but did not
tell ATC because I didn't want to deal with
the paperwork. I ran the good engine pretty
hard so I could keep up a reasonable speed
and not invite any questions. The landing on
the not-so-long home-base runway was a
surprise because the feathered engine didn't
have the drag to help decelerate on landing.
Reflecting on the episode later, I concluded I handled it poorly. My reluctance
to declare an emergency was based on the
fear of having to do paperwork. It occurred
to me I had no idea what paperwork would
be required, and I had never heard of anyone who had actually had to deal with the
paperwork. More important, I had thrown
away the opportunity to have ATC watching

engine. I decided to revert to something I did
know how to do: a single-engine landing.
At this point I was nearing glideslope
capture. It was visual conditions, daytime,
going into my home airport. In the past I
probably would have just feathered the
engine, intercepted the glideslope, dropped
the gear, and motored in. But I got to thinking how the accident report would read and
decided I needed to edit the script. I wanted
to take more time to prepare and make sure
I did not generate an accident report in the
first place. I wanted to run the shut-down
checklist, get configured, and brief the
single-engine landing. In addition, a considerable amount of traffic was departing and
approaching the Class D airspace and in the
pattern for the parallel runways.
I reported to the tower controller I had an
engine problem and I was shutting it down.
I canceled IFR, declared an emergency, and
told the tower I was breaking off the ILS to do
a wide three-sixty to rejoin the localizer and
continue for landing. I thought the 2 to 3 minutes for my three-sixty would be enough time
to secure the offending engine and review
the single-engine approach checklist, and
the Mayday would get the tower controller
to clear the path to the runway.
And that's how it went down. I was able
to progress at my pace with no "best forward
speed" or "reduce speed to...," no worries
about whom to follow or if the airplane for
the parallel runway would overshoot its final
approach course, no vehicles crossing the
runway. It was all rather stress-free.
The landing was uneventful but a bit longer than usual because of the lack of drag on
the feathered side and partial flap (I didn't
feel the need to change configuration and I
knew I had enough runway). The hardest
part was taxiing to the hangar on one engine.
Oh, the paperwork? I did get a request to
call the tower while taxiing in. They wanted
to know if we were all OK. (I did file a NASA
Aviation Safety Reporting System report just
to be on the safe side.)
I hope you never have a problem but if
you do, my suggestion is to declare an emergency and let ATC treat you like you're Air
Force One.
AOPA

AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019

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