The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

I would be quite interested to read that, for reasons I’d rather not discuss on a public forum.

Kinda pricey, though.

The digital version is only $10 (not sure if it’s USD or NZD but cheap enough regardless). Physical copy is a bit of an investment though.

Something has gone wonky with the link I provided and the link @Robot_Arm provided. Trying again:

I hadn’t even looked at the prices. I had it as a paperback I bought for $10 new. But yeah, the digital version is $10.

Here is a different book on the same topic. Not one I’d seen before

This is by the guy who instigated then led the project. The dead-tree versions are $25 and the e-version is $10.

Still not working. Weirdly, the OneBox works. But when I visit the link, it says “Sorry, we couldn’t find the page.”

Maybe this link works?

I tend to edit links to remove all the search-related crap that ties it back to me. That may be fooling Amazon.

Or they may have recently adjusted their code to refuse to work on stripped links. The min functional link for any Amazon item used to be
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DPPTRD2
where the 10-character code after the /dp/ was Amazon’s unique part number of the item. All else was (is?) extraneous. I’ve never seen this behavior before these links today.

Me likey:

Me too. And the Sea Hawk. My wife flew a Black Hawk in Iraq during the war.

Controller’s fault.

While the tower certainly screwed up the landing clearance I doubt the Cessna pilots came within 100 feet of the plane unless it was a 200 ft ceiling. They would have seen and heard what was going on long before they got that close.

It is extremely common to be given clearance to land while the runway is full of other airplanes. The term of art is “anticipated separation”.

Some other countries do not do that; they wait until no kidding the runway is clear before giving clearance. THAT is a PITA.

Under an “anticipated separation” clearance ATC is supposed to alert you to whatever else is going on. “Cleared to land, number 2 following an XYZ 4 miles ahead” or “cleared to land, traffic in position” or “cleared to land, traffic will depart before your arrival”, etc. That way you can knowingly participate in the unfolding situation and use your pilot skill & judgement to prevent the situation from getting uncomfortable close if it doesn’t unfold as ATC had planned.

This very morning my landing clearance came with one airplane about to touch down, one 3 miles out from the runway so 5 miles ahead of me, and a planned departure of a heavy between that second airplane and myself. With landing clearance in hand we watched all that activity unfold as expected and the heavy lifted off when we were about 600 AFE so 2 miles out.

This pilot had a rare thing happen…his turbine engine exploded on him while at cruise altitude. While he builds his own planes and this is a “racing” plane he takes pains to note he never, ever ran the engine outside of its designed performance limits. He’s interesting to listen to. Seems to know his stuff as a pilot and as an engineer.

That’s the plane I’ve been watching on my phone as a project build. I didn’t know it crashed. He modified a Lancair Legacy to cruise at 411 knots out of a plane designed to cruise at 210 knots. That’s crazy fast. The modifications were… substantial.

Before I got through the video my first thought was to shut off the fuel so the hot turbine cans aren’t hit with a busted fuel line. And that’s the first thing he did. He was clearly flying well ahead of the plane. I don’t think anybody could have done this more professionally.

Maybe his next engine should be a complete rebuild so he knows what he’s starting with.

I kept thinking this makes a case for buying a brand new engine but he mentions that a million dollar engine doesn’t make financial sense when these engines are so reliable (the irony thick after what had just happened to him).

Statistics are Statistics. Experience is experience. The smart lottery winner does not spend money buying more tickets.

I didn’t spend 45m watching his vid. If he did anything to uprate that engine he got what he deserved.

Good aviating under pressure though; a big tip o’ the hat to him for an emergency well-handled.

Another thread that may be of interest: Pilot Dies on Miami-Santiago Flight

As mentioned before, he says he always intended and was very careful to run the engine exactly within the manufacturer specs. Never was it goosed to put out more power. Which, he claims, makes this remarkable because such a thing almost never happens to these engines. Almost unheard of.

Very late in the video he shows data from the Garmin system which records performance and it was always within manufacturer performance specs. Then…boom (he does not blame Pratt & Whitney but thinks it was something a previous owner did…maybe some hot starts that were not reported). He says the engine was very close to due for an overhaul/inspection but he lost me on some program that would extend the time allowed to do that. He says these engines should easily surpass those time limits.

Just relaying what the pilot said. Grain of salt and all that.

He also mentioned he’s seen many turboprop owners essentially abuse their engine. Buying a used engine makes sense but overhauling it seems the prudent thing to do.

Something I wounder about is how he has the intake set up. It needs to be something that accelerates fod out of the path of engine induction. You’re probably already aware of how this is done in other turboprops but this engine is housed in a small foot print. Maybe he picked up something off the runway and it finally made itself known.

What gets me is a quick Google says a PT6 engine overhaul is in the neighborhood of $300,000 (can be more or less).

He said a new engine is $1 million. But, cost of the used engine, overhaul cost and time lost to do it all (months) the new engine doesn’t seem such a bad deal (and knowing it is an asset you can sell later).

Obviously I am not in this business and I am sure Patey (pilot whose engine blew up) knows his business and the numbers. Just seems the new engine is more reasonable than it seems at first glance if you have to do all that work on a used engine to have faith in it.

If he paid $250,000 for a used engine and spent another $300,000 he’s still way under the $1 million dollar cost. I’ve done this before with a simple airplane engine and it worked out well. It was assembled under the direction of a really good mechanic who specified what parts to use. His relocation of the oil cooler was probably better than the factory version and cleaned up the layout of hoses.

I was guessing a used PT6 engine would be closer to $500,000 if they are as durable and reliable as mentioned. Almost as good as new.

That’d be a $200,000 savings which is still a lot.

I admit though I have zero experience or reason for that number. I did just guess.