What to do if your engine fails in flight | Emergency Procedures

One of the most common checkride failures comes on the simulated engine out while in flight task, so let's run through a full engine out and forced landing. We're up here in cruise at 4,500 feet, not a care in the world. It goes without saying that every engine out procedure is different, so reference your aircraft checklist in the POH. But we're going to go through the general procedures in a way to help you memorize them. We're going to force our engine out by bringing our fuel to zero in the sim, but we'll run the procedures if we're not sure why our engine failed. The very first thing you do no matter what you're flying is pitch for your best glide speed. In the 172, that's going to be about 65 knots depending on the model. Don't be shy about slowing down either. Pitch up to trade airspeed for altitude and don't do anything until you're at 65. Then, once you're there, adjust pitch to maintain 65 and trim the aircraft to stay there. Only when we're trimmed out should we move to the next item, which in every aircraft should be finding a place to land. We've got rolling hills to our right, and nice fields along the Shenandoah River below us and to our left, so we'll maneuver around to the left. The next step in any aircraft is to troubleshoot our engine failure. How we do this depends on the aircraft, but every aircraft engine needs three things to operate. Fuel, air, and fire. So we're going to check the sources of all three. Fuel comes from our mixture setting, so we'll make sure we're full rich. It also comes from our throttle setting, so we'll check that. It comes from our fuel selector. We'll cycle through the right and left tanks in the both setting. This 172 has a fuel shutoff that you should ensure is on, and we have an auxiliary fuel pump switch to try. Also, if you have a primer, check that it's in and locked. This one doesn't. Sources of air. Air can be introduced through the carburetor heat if we had one. This 172 is fuel injected though and doesn't have carp heat. You might also get a source of air from the alternate air switch like in many pipers. The throttle too can be thought of as a source of air as the open valve brings in air. Fire is on the magnetos. If a mag is misfiring, we could try to run the engine on either the right or left only, then back to both. We can attempt a restart as well, but if the prop is still spinning like it is here, that won't really do anything. The starter motor just causes the prop to spin, which it's doing anyways. Okay, we've checked the sources of fuel, air, and fire, and we can't get the engine restarted. Troubleshooting's over, now it's time to prepare for an emergency landing. If there's time, we're going to squawk the emergency 7700 code in the transponder, then tune to the guard frequency on 121.5, or if we're already talking ATC, broadcast out, tell them our emergency, our proximate position, and fuel and sills on board. After every step of the way, we should be focused back on flying the plane. Make sure we're still at our best glide speed, and judge our approach to our chosen forced landing spot. We're by no means committed to landing at the first spot we picked, and we may decide another option is better as we get a better look from lower and closer in. We need to prepare for a forced landing. We're afraid first of all of a fire. We need to starve the sources of fire. That's our fuel, so we'll pull our mixture to idle. Same thing with our throttle. We'll also want to move the fuel valve to shutoff. The valve here in this 172 doesn't move to the off position, so you'll use the separate fuel shutoff valve. Always fly the airplane. We're getting slow and close to the mountains, so let's adjust our descent accordingly. We're also worried about an electrical fire on landing. Let's kill our electronics. First, the avionics. This will take out our radios and possibly our transponder, so if we still wanted to communicate, we'd need to keep that on. Let's also shut the mags off. Then we'll kill the switches. Now, we're going to keep the master battery on for now. Why? Because the flaps are actuated by the electrical system in the 172, and we want flaps for landing. We just don't want to put them in until we're closer to our landing spot, and we determine that we can accept the added drag from the flaps. Other aircraft have mechanically actuated flaps, in which case you wouldn't need to delay turning the master battery off. Now we just need to focus on pulling off this landing. We're going to try that field at the right side of the river. We're a bit high, so we're going to lose altitude by doing some S-turns later, and a slip if necessary. Here comes the first set of flaps. As we come around, we see that we're high, so here comes all the flaps. If we need to, we can try the wider fields on the left side of the river, but we're going to stay with the original plan. Now that we got our flaps, the master switches can come off. We should ensure our belts are secured and the doors are cracked open. This prevents the doors from getting jammed shut if the cabin crumples a bit on landing. Coming on to final for our field, we're high and fast, too much energy, so we'll bleed it off by S-turning. We could employ the forward slip too, but honestly I find it tough to execute properly in the sim here. Okay, we look much better now, a bit fast, but we'll bleed that off as we've got enough field in front of us. This is a soft field landing, so we want to delay that nose gear from touching down as much as possible by holding the airplane off the ground. An interesting thing that happens in the roundout is because of the reduced airflow, the propeller stops windmilling, which actually adds drag at the last moment, something that can't be replicated in a simulated engine failure in flight. Now that we're down, make sure the aircraft is secure and make your exit. We train and train again for these emergencies, so it should be a memory item on your track ride. I find that thinking through sources of fuel, air, and fire are the best way to organize yourself and stay stress-free during this procedure. I hope it helps you too. Check out Flight Insight Ground Schools at the link here and in the description for more training.