Pilot Down in Pacific

You may have read of the lucky survival of a pilot in the Pacific 1200 km south of Hawaii this week.
According to press reports here [ Australia ], Ray Clamback , 67, was en route to Australia via Hawaii when the engine of his new Cessna 182 seized. He ditched at 7.30 a.m. local time and the aircraft flipped.
He escaped with lifevest, and apparently little else survival gear.
The ditching was observed by an escorting light aircraft who alerted USCG and a Hercules was dispatched from Hawaii.
I saw a quick TV interview with the Herc's pilot who said even though they had good co-ordinates for the search, they still had difficulty finding the guy. They found him eight hours after the ditching.
They dropped a raft and other gear and Clamback was hauled out after 16 hours by the crew of a container ship.
This is the second time Clamback has been rescued after a ditching south of Hawaii. He spent 10 hours in the Pacific in 1999, before rescue. His job is delivering aircraft [ and surviving!].
It will be interesting to hear if there is a survival corollary to this. Given the C-130's pilot's account, did Clamback have a signal mirror, personal EPIRB, flares, waterproof VHF, and strobe on his person? One would hope so.....

For Doug's analysis of the original ditching by Clamback, see

http://www.equipped.org/1199ditch.htm

I love flying, and it seems like it would be great to have a job where I make a living flying a lot, but this doesn't seem like a way I would want to do it.

Thanks Aardwolfe, I forgot that Doug had analysed Clamback's original ditching. I guess that Doug will be on the phone again to our lucky pilot to get his perspective on the latest incident.
Clamback is currently en route to Melbourne on the container ship that picked him up.
On prima facie evidence it appears that Ray Clamback either once again had difficulty with his life raft, probably because of the inverted aircraft, and he had no personal EPIRB. But I find this hard to believe, after his '99 experience...

Whats that old saying " third time makes the charm?" <img src="/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

-- His job is delivering aircraft --

He should add the title "Test Pilot" to his resume. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Are they ever able to retrieve any of these Ocean downed planes to determine what caused the problem and how to correct it?

What brand and series of engines are most often the victims of forced landings. If the problem is engine failure, the brand of airplane is not as important as the brand and model of engines that fail.

Maybe Doug could do a roundup review of engine failures to determine who is making engines with the most failures.

Bountyhunter

I believe that any noticeable trends get picked up by the FAA or similar pretty soon.

Well, I believe one of the problems ferry pilots encounter (I think I read a thread on this in this forum a while back) is that the CO2 canisters used to inflate life rafts are considered "dangerous cargo" and therefore, the cost of shipping them back to the point of origin (after completing the ferry flight) is more than the pilot gets paid for making the flight.

We won't know until someone does an analysis of this second incident, but Laurence Gonzales points out that some people never do get the message Mother Nature is trying to send; he cites the case of a hiker in (IIRC) Grand Canyon National Park who was rescued suffering from heat stroke; six months later he died of hypothermia in a different part of the same park.

There's also the fact that sometimes, pilots who have had a mishap take solace in the fact that "there are those who have, and there are those who are going to" and subconsciously conclude that, since it's happened to them once, it will never happen again.

Whether or not any of this had anything to do with Clamback's second ditching is pure speculation at this point. But, personally, I'd think twice about accepting a lift from him at this point.

OwcA:

But is airplane engine failures by brand and model publically posted and archived anywhere so that the average pilot or wannabe can review it whenever they want?

Bountyhunter <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

If you have an engine failure, and land without doing any major damage or injuring anybody, you don't have to report it. So this data isn't really tracked.

Goatrider:

It should be tracked and reporting engine failures should be stricter than reporting gunshot wounds.

More people would benefit if a pilot reported that he had an engine failure and the exact nature and reason for that engine failure than if he reported that he had a gunshot wound.

The percentage of engine failures may be small and some of them may have occurred due to poor maintenance, but if small airplane engine manufacturers had the same mindset as Saab and Volvo engineers who are notified of accidents in Sweden, those manufacturers would do a better job of making more reliable small aircraft engines.

Bountyhunter

Yes, you're right, it would be very useful information to know. But the rules don't require it, and as far as I know the NTSB doesn't track it. Here's as close as they come:



The NTSB doesn't track a lot of minor aircraft incidents that could be early indicators of safety trends. They don't even track total hours flown for general aviation, which would make the rest of their accident data a lot more meaningful. For example Cessna shows up a lot in the accident data. They have no data about how many hours cessnas are being flown. Does that make Cessna a bad airplane? Well, of course not, there are a lot of Cessnas out there.

Unfortunately things get done much sooner when fatalities start to occur.
Although usually when a number of similar accidents of the same type occur over a relatively short time span an investigation is pending.
I agree that the situation is far from perfect especially in regard to the unreported accidents and unapproved repairs.

NTSB's and FAA's big push the last 5 years has been runway incursions. They tightened the reporting rules, and whoa! Reported runway incursions went up! We've gotta do something about that! So every test you take from the FAA now, there's some in there about hold short lines. Probably including balloon and glider tests, no doubt. Seminars, magazine articles, free posters to every FBO, you name it. All about runway incursions. Probably hasn't made much of a difference.

I don't believe this information would be of any use for several reasons:

1. Most engine failures are caused by the pilot running out of gas. Most of the remaining engine failures are caused by poor maintenance.

2. The number of engine failures for a specific engine type is going to be more or less proportional to the number of those engines in use and the number of hours they fly. There are a lot more Lycomings in service than there are Subaru or Rotax, I suspect; and the Lycomings are going to be installed in commercially produced aircraft that are going to be flown a lot more often than somebody's homebuilt.

3. Different engines are used for different purposes. An engine that is found primarily in high performance aerobatic aircraft, for example, might have a higher incidence of engine failure than the ones in a twin turboprop commuter, simply because it's driven harder. (Or it might not.) Does that mean airshow performers should stick to lower horsepower engines? Not likely <img src="/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

4. There are only a handful of aircraft engine manufacturers out there, and their engines have a very long, very successful track record. Because of the TSO requirements in the US, these manufacturers tend not to make changes to the engine design, simply because it's prohibitively expensive to do so.

5. An engine failure may be caused by something that has nothing to do with the engine - lack of fuel, poor maintenance, dirty/contaminated fuel, ice crystals, carburetor icing, clogged fuel line, oil leak, shock cooling of the engine, applying the throttle too abruptly during a go-around, letting the engine idle too long during a simulated forced approach, etc. etc. There was one case in Flying magazine where a student pilot accidently snagged the ignition key, pulled it out of the ignition, and lost it under her seat. (The instructor was able to retrieve it and restart the engine.)

6. A complete engine failure in flight is usually survivable as long as the pilot maintains control of the aircraft.

7. The vast majority of fatal accidents have nothing to do with engine failure. These are routinely written up and published by the NTSB, Transport Canada, and other similar organisations. In Canada, they're sent out to active pilots on a monthly basis. So pilots have ready access to insight in what causes accidents, yet they still make the same stupid, bonehead mistakes month after month, year after year.

MHOO,OC <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />