The pilot ran out of fuel near the airport, and put down in someone’s driveway.
How did the prop receive damage and not tear up the ground?
Is that the only photo?
Because, he probably slid into the frame with a bent prop. The ground was torn up aways back.
Yup. That, and since the problem was that the engine had stopped due to no fuel, means that the prop wasn’t turning when it landed, so it just folded back a bit, rather than drilling up the turf.
The angle of the photos affects it too. Chances are very good that if you looked at the ground on site, that you’d find that the ground was squashed, but you can’t tell from this particular low-res pic.
I thought on a light plane like that that the prop would keep windmilling as the plane glid to a landing.
But the top blade in the picture is not bent, so the prop was either already stopped, or stopped very quickly once the plane hit the ground.
Thanks!
They can windmill but don’t always is my understanding. (On the one and only time my engine stopped during flight the prop kept turning)
With no engine driving the prop there’s not that much force behind it, so yes, it may well stop turning almost immediately once it touches something like the ground.
That plane looks like a Mooney to me (distinctive tail fin) which has a variable-pitch in-flight controllable prop. If the pilot “feathered” it after the engine failure to reduce drag that might have also led to a stop or at least a slower, less-powerful windmilling effect.
if it was a turboprop, likely yes. that one appears to have a piston engine, though, and whether it would “windmill” depends on if the planes airspeed and prop pitch generate enough torque to keep the engine turning.
“Hey Buddy, you can’t park here!”
Not too much to add. Generally speaking props of single engine airplanes cannot be feathered. Twins have that feature since feathering the dead engine is often the difference between continuing to fly barely, or havng the drag from the windmilling prop be so high the airplane can’t fly on just the other engine.
It is often possible for a pilot to stop the prop after an engine failure. That improves the glide capabilities. But it take a lot of presence of mind and some counterintuitive moves to do it. In the vast majority of lightplane forced landings the prop is windmilling at touchdown.
Overall I’m surprised to not see a furrow of some sort plowed into the lawn. There might be a hint of a furrow coming in from the left side of the frame just in front of the shadow of the right wing. Implying it was sliding half-backwards when it came to a stop.
All the interesting dynamics were back around touchdown. Which we don’t have any pictures of.
Here are some more photos:
The last two in the gallery show the lawn behind the plane.
Nit pick
Piston driven single engine aircraft very seldom have a prop that can be feathered. Variable pitch, yes but even in high pitch, with slow airspeed, there has to be strong compression to stop the engine from windmilling.
Ever tried it? It is something you should know about every aircraft you fly more than a few times.
Old tired C-180 required high pitch, full 40° of flaps and a deep stall to get the engine to stop rotating and you had to keep it very slow or it would start revolving again. A 260 HP Piper Comanche B that’s engine was ‘stout’ took a lot of effort to keep it rotating. The glide performance is way different than a normal glide with the engine just throttled back as they are normally flown.
If unpracticed, I don’t think the avg. pvt pilot would/could get it done from a low altitude what with the ‘running out of fuel’ that was going on. Also, gliding with an non-rotating engine/propeller changes the glide characteristic so much that getting into a short place that much harder even if you do not over glide to it.
A waste of time unless you are quick, know how to do it in that particular aircraft and absolutely have to get the extra distance covered or you will 100% die.
It is like turning back to the airport with a failed engine on takeoff. The average pilot does not know his aircraft to make trying it work out vs just going straight or nearly straight ahead when total engine power is lost.
There are exceptions but few know & practice the things they need to know.
There were things I could do with an old 1956 C-180 that you would not believe if I told them. We got the insurance so cheap because to be covered the pilot had to have 3000 hours in THAT airplane. Bawahahahaha, the company owner loved it. The cheap part and he also had over 3K in that machine like I had just gotten to.
Seldom do pvt pilots get to that point for many reasons.
He is going to have some splainin to do for the FAA. They really frown on running out of fuel.
The plane looks fairly low time, has a fancy 3 blade prop that is not in a high pitch setting and judging buy what I can see of the ground around it, he did a no gear landing on purpose. If it had failed earlier, the aircraft would be showing more damage. Was the ground really that soft to get him to belly it like that?
Looks like he was landing beside the drive way and slid into a slight left turn before stopping. Judging by it supposedly being afternoon, he was going North bound .
Did some looking and he almost made it to the airport…
Go South to 133rd street, then East to a point just to the left ( West ) of the pond on the North side of the street and the picture ( cropped I believe ) was taken looking to the EastSouthEast, across the shallow drainage, the driveway, the nose of the plane wouold seem to me to be and the storm shelter by the blue building…
You can mess around with both pictures by zooming in & out and rotation of the street view to get it all to make sense if you wish.
IMO, he knew he was going to be real close and was milking it for all he knew how. Just came up a bit short in several different ways. After all the mistakes, he lucked out in the end. Except for having to to do the ‘splainin’ part and fixing his plane.
Or I could be totally wrong also. 
:smack: 
My first thought was that running out of fuel is an inexcusable mistake.
Why did he land gear up? Did he think he would make it to the airport and the gear would cause drag?
Well, with the added pictures, I was wrong about the gear being up. So was he going West bound on a right base leg??
I fail to see much in the ground as damage so did he ground loop to the right just before he stopped??
Be nice to know where he was coming from and how long was the flight time. Also his PIC time and time in type. Also his statement.
Anyone have ideas on the lack of ground damage and the damage to the landing gear with so little damage to the prop? Going so slow the engine had stopped turning?
I don’t think he was trying to land on the drive way, I now think he was going West bound.
And I could still be wrong on other points too.
SLS Guy?
I’m as mystified as you Gus.
Clearly he’d deployed the landing gear. Two of which folded during the runout. I’d expect the lawn to be a lot more torn up than we see. Unless he’d managed to land mostly on the too-narrow driveway with two of three gear on the driveway and one on the grass. Which it sort of looks like he did, with the right main running off into the grass at low speed, causing a slight final groundloop to the right.
BUT …
I’d expect the gear legs(s) in the grass to be far more likely to fold than the gear legs(s) on the pavement.
One last thought is he had the gear up until very short final then realized he might salvage the situation on that nice paved driveway. So he flips the gear down switch but touches down while it’s still in transit. IIRC the Mooney has electric gear drive. Which might be a lot slower under battery power than it is with the alternator turning. Or he just decided too late.
If the landing gear held up for most of the deceleration that would explain the prop damage. As he slowed through (total WAG) 40mph the prop finally stopped with one blade up & two down. Then the gear collapsed and drug those two blades across the ground, leaving the third undamaged. Or this is almost what happened and one blade hit the ground turning, got bent a lot, the next blade hit the ground barely turning and got bent a little, and that was that; the engine never made the last 120 degrees of rotation needed to bend the final blade.
Agree that there’s not much excuse for running out of fuel on a sunny day in a part of the country littered with airports. The Feds will not be happy. OTOH, there’s not a lot of sanction they can apply to a recreational pilot that his insurance company and his wife won’t already be applying.
All in all I’d rephrase the OP and the news media’s characterization of this as a “plane crash”. It’s a mostly-successful forced landing. There’s no reason that plane and pilot won’t be flying again. Eventually. And after applying a lot of universal airplane repair balm: AKA dollars.
lower case so I can use upper case
ALYCWAFIAGO.
‘Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.’
Ayup! Hadn’t seen that as an initialism before and started off on the wrong track decoding it with “At least you can …”.
And you can even re-use that airplane. After a bit of effort.
I made it up for the post. (Typing it in Google, I did find a single link, where someone used AlycWafiago as a username.)
Then it’s a great landing!
Aha! Yup. Look at the SECOND from the last. You can see that he landed at a ninety degree angle to the pavement, tore up the lawn in the distance, and as the plane came to a stop on THIS side of the blacktop, it twisted to the side.
The reason there’s no torn up grass directly behind the plane as it came fully to rest, is that directly behind it, is NOT where it landed.