Almost any assessment of the Accident Briefs section of this magazine’s issues reveals that engine failures, followed by the inevitable arrival back to Mother Earth, pose a significant contribution to the accident record and the NTSB’s workload. What happens after the engine fails isn’t the topic of this article, but what causes the failure—and preventing it from happening—is. At the outset, it’s important to note that engine failures per se are not part of the accident statistics—an engine failure only appears on the NTSB’s (or the FAA’s) radar if the airplane is damaged or its occupants injured. A small airplane’s engine failure followed by a landing in which nothing was damaged and no one was hurt isn’t counted.
Some years ago, I was fortunate to participate in efforts of the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee (GAJSC) to closely examine the underlying causes of general aviation accidents and recommend ways to mitigate them. You may recall some out- comes from those efforts, which include industry-wide emphasis on preventing in-flight loss of control (LOC-I) and the FAA’s relaxed certification standards for angle-of-attack instrumentation installed in small airplanes. Our workgroup focused on powerplant failures. It was a total-immersion opportunity to learn how piston aircraft engines fail, and can be failed. Here are three of the typical engine-failure causes we explored.
