| I don't have definitive information. As far as I know, never took HPAT or equivalent. As far as I know, total time in last 6 months was the 5 hours engine breakin time. There were conflicting reports about whether the "pressure" problem was oil pressure or fuel pressure. I believe he was intending to operate LOP on this trip. Anyone have LOP numbers for an IO-550 at 8000?
Again the log records 3:17 of flight but does not include the climb (7 minutes?) nor the descent ( 12 minutes? but was that power on or power off? one thing very peculiar about the track log is that there is no descent.) 3:17 + 7 + 12 = 3:36 If you add 3 gallons for climb and take off, the total burns come out like this:
burn rate total burn
14 53.4 15 57 16 60.6 17 64.2
If he were really at 17 and knew it I think he would have done something about it. I suspect there were other contributing factors. ...like faulty fuel flow reporting, faulty fuel level gauging, max usable fuel less than thought, or maybe it really was oil pressure.
I looked at the google earth view for the general area. I'm not sure which field he landed in but they all looked smallish and maybe intimidating at speed. It's hard to know what happened in the final moments but the wreckage doesn't look consistent with forward progress once on the ground.
Do we know this was fuel exhaustion? I know I ran my IO-550 150+
degrees ROP throughout the break-in process. I also flew low to keep
75% power. That's at or above 15 GPH.
I thought I read something about oil pressure. I guess we'll find out more
in time. Only 5 hours on a newly rebuilt engine seems minimal before a
long cross country. A rebuilt engine doesn't constitute a major
modification, so there's really no need to re-enter Phase 1 flight testing for a
minimum of 5 hours, unless there was more work done that just an R&R.
Losing an engine shouldn't be fatal. What do we know about the pilot
and his training, time in type, etc.? Maybe Colyn can give us a bit more
about the pilot's experience.
Just sorting through the scenario like I do with every Lancair
accident.
Mike Easley
Colorado Springs
In a message dated 5/11/2011 1:17:19 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time,
edmartintx@aol.com writes: At
high altitude, a stock Legacy with IO-550 should burn approximately 10.5
gallons/hour using "lean-of-peak" technique. In this
example, actual flight time was over four hours with 21 gallons remaining
(66-gallon capacity). Please see: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N767EM
J. E. MARTIN
-----Original
Message----- From: Karen Farnsworth < farnsworth@charter.net> To:
lml < lml@lancaironline.net> Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 11:22
am Subject: [LML] Re: N23PH Crash
Flight Aware shows 3 hours 50 min, not 3 hours
15 min. That is a long way on 60 gallons..
If, as has been
reported, the engine was new, I would think that it was still being broken in.
This would lead me to thing that fuel flow would be on the high side; thus
reducing range.
Just a
thought.
Lynn
Farnsworth |