Posted on 04/05/2015 5:15:11 PM PDT by Stayfree
My neighbor who flies out of Van Nuys and Santa Monica told me that he had a conversation with the operators of a fuel truck at Santa Monica airport recently in which the fuel truck operators said that for some reason they were not asked to fill up Harrison Ford's vintage airplane with fuel which they usually do before he uses the plane and that Ford just hopped aboard the plane without checking it out before taking off.
I have no way of verifying this, but it apparently the most recent news coverage suggested engine failure, but now explanation as to why the engine failed....lack of fuel sounds like a reasonable explanation to me!
“Kick the tire, light the fire, brief on Guard, and first one in the air gets the lead.”
“Two”
you like flying out of Arkansas?
Flew in to Gastons on the White River once right after a flood.
Knocked the heck out of their docks.
Real pretty country.
We live on an airpark also, S36 in Washington State. We are sick of the dreary weather up here. We got back from Florida 3 weeks ago where we were looking at airpark homes. We are going to be putting our house on the market in the next month and trying to move.
4.5gph is very impressive! When we first got the Cherokee, I was very impressed with the fuel economy possible with the O-320. When we go on a trip we fly at a higher power setting using around 8gph, but locally we can putter around at around 100mph and use only about 5gph. Fortunately, we have the STC and a station nearby which sells autogas without alcohol which makes flying much more affordable.
We switch tanks about once an hour also to keep our plane balanced. The plane wants a little rudder trim to one side when both tanks are full so we always start on the heavy wing.
We are in hilly country, just a few miles from the Cascade Mountains. We have obstructions to clear on both ends of our field. If it is hot, I don’t try to take off to the South with full tanks. The most common accident with a Cherokee is caused by trying to get the plane in the air before it is up to flying speed. The plane will get in a nose high attitude and mush along in ground effect until something solid gets in your way.
Mine just wants to jump into the air when it’s chilly otherwise I pull the stick back til the nose wheel comes off the ground then push it forward to lower it a bit then hold er steady and it just goes.
Unlike a 150 where once you get up you have to push it forward to gain speed this just continues to gain speed and fly.
Lycoming 160 with a full IFR panel.
LIfe is good.
In the past we have had fuel pressure issues when taking off from the LA area. Because our plane is a low wing it has an electric auxiliary fuel pump, you take off with it on, but if the plane has been sitting on a hot ramp and the fuel is warm the agitation caused by the two fuel pumps sometimes causes the fuel to start vaporizing in the lines or in the pumps. This lowers your fuel pressure and can cause issues. The worst case is called “vapor lock” which can cause complete fuel starvation.
My wife and I were once flying out of Santa Paula (KSZP) on a summer afternoon, the temperature was around a 100F and our fuel pressure dropped to near zero when climbing out. We have an engine scanner that gives an EGT reading on each cylinder. An alarm went off because they had started going up... indicating that we were starting to run lean.
We lowered our nose and throttled back a bit. We thought about turning off the auxiliary pump but left it running fearing that we might make a hairy situation worse. By the time we got over the ocean the fuel pressure had come back to normal. But it was a tense few moments.
We had started off in Washington State a few days before with our tanks full of autogas. Autogas is more volatile than 100LL aviation fuel. On the way down we stopped at Yolo County Airport (KDWA) because at that time they still sold autogas. When we arrived at Santa Paula we topped off the tanks with 100LL. It was hot down there every day and the plane was parked outside. By the time we took off a few days later the temperature had already just about peaked.
I have been told that one of the problems with autogas is that it is often mixed with local conditions in mind. You get a different blend in the winter than you do in the summer, and areas where it is cooler can get a more volatile blend than for places where it is warmer.
Harrison Ford’s beautiful airplane appears to have had a radial engine and a low wing. I doubt whether he was using autogas, but depending on the conditions and the type of fuel delivery system I am curious if it is possible that he could have had a drop in fuel pressure even if his tanks were not empty.
That is what you absolutely have to do with our Cherokee with the 150hp Lycoming taking off from a soft field. People get nervous when the trees start filling up the windscreen and try to get the plane to climb out before reaching the optimal speed. One good thing about the Cherokee... if you pull down your manual flaps it will pop you up a hundred feet or so almost instantly if you have the speed.
I think I’ll wait for something a bit more substantive than a conversation someone had with their neighbor about a conversation the neighbor said he had with some guys at the airport.
Comparing Paris Hilton to Harrison Ford? That’s just funny as all get out.
I was taught by my primary instructor to NEVER trim for airspeed on takeoff climb. I was told to hold my own airspeed all the way up. Nobody i ever talk to about that seems to have been told that but me.
Auto fuel should not be a problem in the low compression Kinner engine - it’s rated for 73 octane fuel...:^)
I *think* the entire fuel system is gravity fed since the primer is only activated from outside of the plane.
A nice description of the PT-22 is here -
http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2008/June/1/Ryan-PT-22-Not-Just-Another-Pretty-Face
Note the bit in the article about the poor glide performance.
I can understand where your instructor was coming from, especially with an aircraft which has harsh stall characteristics. But if you are climbing out to an altitude higher than what you would use for local traffic then I would say that he is a glutton for punishment. Personally, I trim for everything all the time, but as far as I am concerned the Cherokee has a much easier to use trim handle than a Cessnas that I have rented. Plus in normal CG loadings a Cherokee 140 won’t really even do a genuine takeoff stall; they tend to just “porpoise”.
One of the primary reason that Harrison Ford is probably still alive is that he must have listened to his instructor when told never to do a 180 to get back to the airport during an engine failure on climb out. We have had two fatal climb out accidents on the airport where I live, both experimentals and both where the pilots tried to do a 180 to return to the airport. They both stalled in the turn and crashed into the same little old lady’s house, even coming through the ceiling of the same room.
A Cherokee had a climb out accident where he didn’t clear the trees at the south end of the field. He didn’t let the plane get up to speed before trying to climb out. You can usually get away with that with a Cessna trainer or 172, but not a Cherokee. Everyone walked away from the Cherokee accident.
We have a little Skypup homebuilt ultralight airplane. The fuel sits in a tank right behind the engine, but the Rotax engine that is mounted on it still has a fuel pump because the bottom of the tank is actually below the level of the carburetor. The tank is semi transparent and sitting right in front of you so you can see when it is running out. The plane has a 25mph stall speed and a 10 to 1 glide ratio, so an emergency landing is much less challenging than in a General Aviation airplane.
I nearly always give er 10 degrees when taking off and as soon as I get er up I straighten em out.
few things more fun that chasing a piper or Cessna down after giving them a head start.
Fly around em giving em plenty of room.
I nearly always give er 10 degrees when taking off and as soon as I get er up I straighten em out.
few things more fun that chasing a piper or Cessna down after giving them a head start.
Fly around em giving em plenty of room.
However, wasn’t the Ford accident on take-off?
My reply to the poster (expat) solely concerned his comment that pilots concerning pilots checking their fuel supply prior to flight as a "second nature". I pointed out that that is not always the case. I'll await the NTSB report concerning the FACTS about Ford's accident before addressing the actual cause of his crash......
John Denver was flying a Rhutan design which had a primer tank for starting the engine with the nose gear collapsed. That aircraft also had a placement of the valve to the main tank that varied from the original design and could not be reached in flight. He did skip the portion of some checklist to get himself in that situation
I still maintain that preflight check of fuel (and oil) is second nature — of course there are idiots like the guy in your example but one can always find rare exceptions to every rule. Ford was apparently an experienced pilot.
No, you are right, I was also taught to “fly” it out and in by stick and rudder. I was alluding to cruise trim in level flight.
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