AOPA Pilot Magazine - December 2022 - 92

RUDDER & WRENCH
Forced landing
The CFI realized that he had no chance of
making Watsonville, and he started looking
for a plan B. His first thought was Pacific
Coast Highway, but he could see that it had
heavy automobile traffic and a lot of overpasses,
making a successful forced landing
on the highway unlikely. So, he decided his
best option would be to attempt a landing
on the beach, which was obscured by a
thick marine layer of low clouds.
Fortunately, the CFI had ForeFlight
running on his iPad coupled via Bluetooth
to a battery-powered Stratus ADS-B
receiver with internal attitude heading refdepleted.)
There was no damage to the
airplane or any of its three occupants,
although the passenger in the back seat
was visibly shaken by the harrowing experience.
Who could blame her?
Upon egressing the airplane, the CFI
noted that the fuselage belly and empennage
were covered with engine oil. There
was no oil visible on the dipstick.
Anything wrong with
this picture?
While listening to the CFI being interviewed
shortly after the incident and
looking at his FlightAware ground track,
I couldn't help but
admire how he kept
his cool under pressure
and made a
series of good decisions
that resulted in
a great outcome. Yet
there were a couple
of aspects of his
story that I found
disturbing.
Even though the
CFI was flying from
the right seat with the
engine gauge cluster
smack dab in front of
him, he didn't notice
the loss of oil pressure
until the engine
was literally on the
verge of seizing and
the gauge was reading
erence system (AHRS). He configured his
iPad display to show a simulated six-pack
instrument cluster on the top half of the
screen and a moving-map sectional chart
on the bottom half. With the help of this
display, the CFI headed toward the beach
and made a dead-stick descent into the
cloud tops at 1,600 feet.
When he finally broke out at 400 feet,
the CFI saw nothing but ocean in the
windshield. Then he looked across the
cabin and spotted the beach out of the left
window. He made a left turn toward the
beach and made a perfect dead-stick noflap
landing on the wet sand. (The flaps
were inoperative because the battery was
92
AOPA PILOT / December 2022
zero. How long had the oil pressure been
below the bottom of the 55 to 95 psi green
arc? Why didn't the CFI notice it earlier?
If he had noticed it earlier, could he
have throttled back to low power and prevented
the engine from seizing? Or at least
delayed the seizure? Could he have limped
to an on-airport landing at Watsonville if
he'd detected the situation earlier?
Once the engine did seize and the
prop stopped, why did the CFI attempt
to restart it with the starter motor-
not just once, but repeatedly until the
ship's battery was depleted and electrical
power to the avionics and flaps was
lost? While I'm sure that a restart attempt
is on the power-loss checklist, it is obviously
an exercise in futility with an engine
that seized because of systemic lubrication
failure. Visualize the CFI stretching
to reach the key switch located on the
extreme left side of the panel. How much
precious time was lost doing these multiple
futile restart attempts? Wouldn't it
have been better to focus on aviating, navigating,
and communicating?
Both these things-late recognition of
loss of oil pressure and multiple attempts
to restart the seized engine-strike me as
indicating a lack of situational awareness of
the aircraft systems on the part of the CFI.
Certainly, his situational awareness with
respect to aerodynamics and navigation was
nothing short of superb-but with respect to
aircraft systems, not so much.
I fully realize that almost all pilots
(including me) don't scan the engine gauges
as often as we should. So, I'm not really surprised
that this obviously excellent CFI
failed to notice that the oil pressure gauge
had dropped below the green arc. That's
why I'm convinced that every airplane
should be equipped with a digital engine
monitor that has lots of sensors (including
oil pressure and temperature) and has userprogrammable
alarm thresholds so that the
pilot will be alerted whenever any critical
engine parameter goes outside of normal
operating limits.
The green arc for oil pressure is 55 to
95 psi for most Lycomings and 30 to 60
psi for most Continentals. In my opinion,
pilots should receive both visual and
aural alarms anytime oil pressure is outside
those limits while the aircraft is in flight.
This is a condition that the pilot needs to
know about immediately.
With respect to the futility of trying to
crank a seized, oil-starved engine until the
battery is depleted, this seems like a training
deficiency and a power-loss checklist
that needs a little tweaking.
Proving the point
As I was about to sit down at my computer
to write this column, my phone rang. The
caller was an emergency room physician
who owns a Piper PA-28-236 Dakota
and was seeking my advice regarding an
AOPA Pilot Magazine - December 2022

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