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bryanmmartin
Joined: 10 Jan 2006
Posts: 1018
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 Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 4:11 pm Post subject: Forced landing in Ohio |
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I was planning to fly down to Sun 'N' Fun on the first of April in my
Zodiac. The weather that morning in the Detroit area was crappy so I waited
around until noon. At that time there was a 2000 foot overcast with 3000
foot tops and it had quit raining. The weather south of Ohio was reported as
clear so I decided to take off and see. I flew under the Detroit class B at
about 1500 feet and started to see some breaks in the overcast.
An hour into the flight I was just southeast of the Toledo class C when the
engine suddenly started shaking and lost about 600 RPM. I was about 5 miles
north of Wood County Airport (1G0) so I pulled the throttle and started
gliding towards the airport. All my guages were in the green and the engine
stayed running but very rough. When I got down to about 200 feet above the
ground with nothing but plowed fields and a crowded freeway below me I
realized I wasn't going to be able to glide to the airport. The engine was
still making power so I shoved the throttle back in and managed to get about
200 feet per minute climb rate out of it. It was enough to get me lined up
on runway 18 with a 15 knot crosswind directly from the west. I called up
the unicom and anounced my intentions and then made a safe landing.
After I taxied up to the terminal, I shut it down and got out and started
looking for the trouble. Everything looked OK from the outside of the
engine. No oil or coolant leaks and no appearant damage. I didn't have
enough tools with me to do muc troubleshooting so I barrowed the courtesy
car to go down to the store to buy a spark plug wrench. I finally determined
that I had no compression on the number 1 cylinder and when I pulled that
plug, there was impact damage to the electrode. My preliminary determination
was some sort of valve train failure. Since I couldn't do much to fix the
problem right then and it wasn't fit to fly home, I tied it down for the
night and called to reserve a rental car.
The folks at Wood County treated me very well they even offered to put the
plane in a hangar for the night. One of the instructors was giving a lesson
that day and gave me a ride up to Toledo Express Airport so I could pick up
my rental, saving me the expense of a taxi ride.
I drove the rental home that night and the next day drove up to Midland to
get my trailer and my dad and brother to help me recover the airplane. We
then drove down to Bowling Green to tear down the plane for the haul back
home. The people at the airport let me use put the plane in a hangar to
dissasemble it for the trip back. It's a good thing they did, it was pouring
down rain by the time we got done loading in the trailer. We got the plane
back to my hangar at Ray and got the rental returned to the local depot and
got back to Midland at about 2 AM. Monday evening, I decided to use some of
my frequent flyer miles to complete the trip to Lakeland and let the
airplane wait until I got back.
Today I finally got to my hangar to start tearing down the engine to see
what went wrong. I heard stories about valve guide failures in some of the
EA81 engines so I thought I might find the same thing with mine. It turns
out that the problem wasn't the valve guides. A big chunk of the intake
valve in the number 1 cylinder broke off and did mayhem inside the engine.
The piston had a bunch of holes in it and had several cracks clear across
the face of the piston. The piston skirt must also be all broken up because
you can rock the piston back and forth in the cylinder. There also seems to
be some collateral damage to the intake valve in the number 3 cylinder,
probably by bits of metal getting blown back into the intake manifold. Our
resident engine expert took a look at the valve and decided that it was a
fatigue failure possibly caused by a slight misalignment of the valve. There
is some evidence that the valve was hitting harder on one side of the port
than the other. I've put 145 hours on the engiine since I bought from
Stratus.
I plan on pulling off the other head to check it and will probably send both
of them off to RAM for rebuild.
--
Bryan Martin
N61BM, CH 601 XL, Stratus Subaru.
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_________________
--
Bryan Martin
N61BM, CH 601 XL, Stratus Subaru.
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n801bh(at)netzero.com
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| Posted: Sun Apr 09, 2006 6:37 pm Post subject: Forced landing in Ohio |
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Glad to hear you and the plane are OK. Good job on the forced landing too....................
do not archive
Glad to hear you and the plane are OK. Good job on the forced landing too....................
do not archive
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