N316MG Magni M16 - Cape Giradeau - 29-5-20

Sorry was cryptic just because its an email I received that doesn't reflect that well on the aircrafts operation if true, just something about high time and no use of the boost to protect the motor.
 
Do instructors never move from the very start of the runway when supervising a solo? A runway of 1981metres is just over one mile long, but, if the instructor places himself halfway along the runway after the initial take off he will be no further than 990 metres from the craft on the runway at any time. Much easier to observe what is occurring.

My instructor equipped himself with handheld radio and managed to take a stroll to the runway midpoint.

Just the idle thoughts of a newly released student pilot.

phil
 
Do instructors never move from the very start of the runway when supervising a solo? A runway of 1981metres is just over one mile long, but, if the instructor places himself halfway along the runway after the initial take off he will be no further than 990 metres from the craft on the runway at any time. Much easier to observe what is occurring.

My instructor equipped himself with handheld radio and managed to take a stroll to the runway midpoint.

Just the idle thoughts of a newly released student pilot.

phil
That may be possible at untowered airports, but in this case the tower probably wasn't going to be too keen on pedestrians on the active part of the field.
 
Sorry was cryptic just because its an email I received that doesn't reflect that well on the aircrafts operation if true, just something about high time and no use of the boost to protect the motor.
Ah, well it was a 15-yo aircraft. What info do you have about the engine and its hours?
When you say "the boost", are you talking about the 5 minutes allowed at 115 hp?
 
Do instructors never move from the very start of the runway when supervising a solo? A runway of 1981metres is just over one mile long, but, if the instructor places himself halfway along the runway after the initial take off he will be no further than 990 metres from the craft on the runway at any time. Much easier to observe what is occurring.

My instructor equipped himself with handheld radio and managed to take a stroll to the runway midpoint.

Just the idle thoughts of a newly released student pilot.

phil
In the USA at an airport with an operating control tower there is a non-movement where typically the hangars and the self-service fuel are.

All the taxiways and runways are part of the movement area.

To cross from the non-movement area to the movement area I need to call ground because they are responsible for separation in the movement area.

Looking at the Cape Girardeau Regional airport diagram all of taxiway echo and all of taxiway alpha are movement areas with no way for a spectator to get past them from the terminal.

The tower has a big book of rules about how close things can be to the runway with aircraft in operation.

Some towers will allow spectators to cross the movement area for a better view but most will not.

As can be seen from the diagram it is more than a mile from the edge of the non-movement area to the end of runway two eight.

If you look up the satellite picture of Cape Girardeau Regional airport and zoom in you can see the lines that delineate the movement area.

When I am doing supervised solo work at my home airport (KSMX) I am specific about where I want my client to touch down and takeoff so I can see what they are doing from my vantage point.

We discuss what they did well and how they might improve in the debrief.

Typically only the first two solo flights are directly supervised and after that they call with the weather and flight plan and I approve the flight.
 

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Sorry folks, living and flying in France I have never flown from a fully controlled airfield. Advantages of the sticks.

Thank you for the clarifications @Vance @Tyger
 
Ah, well it was a 15-yo aircraft. What info do you have about the engine and its hours?
When you say "the boost", are you talking about the 5 minutes allowed at 115 hp?

So the email I got was from someone suggesting they had actually flown 316MG but were forbidden from using 100% throttle [ i.e. past the detent to engage full power - as you say the 5 mins worth of 115hp] as they [when i say "they" can only assume whoever he flew with] didn't want the stress on the motor as it had gone beyond the Rotax 914 TBO. I'm not sure if that accurately reflects the scenario of the aircraft as it was crashed, prior, or if it is an entirely fictional [although an odd claim to be making].
 
I had some training down in MO a few years ago on a different machine (a much newer one), and my CFI also discouraged use of "turbo" past the detent. It just did not seem necessary on long runways at resonably low altitudes. The only time I remember using it for anything, beside a demonstration, was on a XC trip where we took off from turf, sort of a "soft field". I wouldn't give the fact of suggesting a student not use it too much weight.
Now, if the accident engine actually was well past TBO, that's a bit different – but do we actually know that?
 
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Well I guess in a way none of it something to scream bloody murder if you isolate the view to thoughts of having 6000ft of tarmac available and so you can take your time. Yet these things get filed away and come back to bite.

My own view on take offs generally is that you use all the power because then your climb performance is improved and the day the engine quits I have either cleared the thing I didn't want to hit and/or I have more height to sort out my issue. It is why I don't like the more recent trend where some are advocates of "take off power" where it means something less than full throttle which is done to make things easier for students, especially in the wheel balance phase.

The other element about training without the use of full power is that not only can you never achieve the POH take off numbers [which all makes a mockery of student exams that talk about performance...none of them talk about using full throttle because in the past that part has been a given!] but the day the student becomes a pilot in his own right he has two potential snags waiting. The first with his muscle memory / default what it is - he isn't used to going through the detent, and so doesn't. The second is he now needs to use all of the power available to him in order to take off successfully and now the process and speed of actions is a shock.

Flying with a motor beyond TBO in the UK is called "flying on condition" and is legal for private pilots own use but not if the aircraft is used for instructional purposes. I've no idea what the situation is in the US but strikes me that electing to put a student into an aircraft where the use of part throttle is to protect a motor that is beyond TBO is exceptionally poor form / utterly stupid. If that was the case I should think the instructor is thankful that his customer was able to walk away. The NTSB report will be interesting.
 
I understand your point about not using "full power", but it's all relative, isn't it? The 100hp I used flying with the 914 during training, even though a bit more was occasionally available, is the same 100hp I get with my 912 ULS now. I find that perfectly adequate for the places I usually fly. I do not miss dealing with the added complexities of the turbo (not to mention the additional weight and cost).
I don't think we can assume that the age of the airframe implies that its engine was past TBO. Its previous owner has stated here that it was well maintained. That might have included major engine work, or even a new engine, but I have not heard anything specific with regard to that. There is a helo/gyro maintenance & repair shop at KCGI.
 
I think Greg Gremminger usually teaches students to go to the indent (100 HP) on 914 powered machines for regular takeoffs and use more power for soft or short field takeoffs. On a one mile long runway one up that really isn't the reason for an accident. This is just student pilot error it seems to me.
 
Torque rollover! "The pilot throttled back up, causing the gyrocopter to flip over".
I doubt it. Gyroplanes of this configuration just don't roll over on the ground when they get powered up unless the pilot does also do something wrong.
This just seems like bad execution and bad judgment call from the student pilot. Oil Pressure light comes on and you ignore it. NO!!. Actually HELL NO!!! You can fly 91x series of engines for a bit with coolant completely gone but if oil is gone, that engine will quit shortly. It was time to call it a day. Bad call. Bad judgment and then taking back off if the engine did not produce full power, he was simply behind the power (to much drag for given power) and decided to land in the soft area. That is what the initial report suggests to me.
Lesson. Never ignore warning lights. It comes on and you are at the airport land and stop.

One other poster suggested that student just gunned the throttle for unknown reason near the end of the runway while taxiing back to exit it and it made it takeoff unexpectedly. That's pretty simple to understand. The student pilot had a senior moment perhaps. You can't have senior moments in flying. If the unknown reason isn't a good one. This pilot should evaluate his fitness for becoming a pilot in command. I know a bit direct but frankly he got off easy. It could have been a lot worse and next time it probably will be if truly he had no good reason for gunning it that close to the end
 
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FYI, Greg pretty much retired from primary training back in 2019:

That's a shame. I think he is a very good instructor and a great reasonable guy. I hope to see him around at airshows etc.
 
Flying with a motor beyond TBO in the UK is called "flying on condition" and is legal for private pilots own use but not if the aircraft is used for instructional purposes. I've no idea what the situation is in the US but strikes me that electing to put a student into an aircraft where the use of part throttle is to protect a motor that is beyond TBO is exceptionally poor form / utterly stupid. If that was the case I should think the instructor is thankful that his customer was able to walk away. The NTSB report will be interesting.
Mike Busch wrote a book called The Savvy Aviator and regularly writes articles about the “myths of TBO”. This particular excerpt is from AVweb. It is based on real world experience rather than gossip. The whole article is available here: https://www.avweb.com/ownership/the-savvy-aviator-4-debunking-tbo/

“Continuing to fly an engine beyond TBO is dangerous because doing so increases the chance of an in-flight engine failure.”

To the contrary, an engine is much more likely to fail during the first few hundred hours after major overhaul than during the first few hundred hours after passing published TBO. If you exclude fuel starvation or exhaustion (i.e., pilot error), most engine stoppages involve mechanical failure of some “top end” engine component like a cylinder, exhaust valve, piston, magneto, turbocharger, exhaust stack, etc. Such bolt-on components are routinely replaced during normal maintenance without any need to overhaul the engine. The purpose of a major engine overhaul is to inspect, recondition and or replace the engine’s “bottom end” components — crankshaft, camshaft, crankcase, gears, bearings, etc. — that cannot be accessed without splitting the case. But these “bottom end” components are seldom implicated in catastrophic engine failures. Furthermore, in those rare cases when these components do fail (e.g., crankshaft fracture), the failure is almost never correlated with time since overhaul. (If a crankshaft is going to fail, it’s most likely to fail during the first few hundred hours after manufacture, or after a prop strike.)

All of the Rotax 914 failures I have had were on engines that had less than 600 hours of flight time..

It appears from the registration that N316MG does not belong to the flight instructor.

Based on what has been posted on this thread N316MG had a recent condition inspection.
 
I actually screwed up pretty good as a student pilot on solo at KCGI. I had flown there to get some extra time at a towered airport, and then as one leg of my required XC. It is often busy there; it was a nice day out and it was indeed pretty busy that day. I had spun up to about 100 rrpm at the hold-short line for 20 and told the tower I was ready for takeoff. He cleared me for immediate takeoff as there was a plane just on base leg. I quickly moved out onto the runway and spun up to about 200 rrpm, but in my haste I did not pull back the stick beforehand. As I started my roll, I glanced at the rrpm... why isn't it going up?? Then I was like, "Oh $%#&"! Despite the thought of a plane quickly approaching from my rear, I cut power, pulled the stick back slowly, then reapplied power gradually (luckily had plenty of runway), and from then on all went according to plan. Thankfully.
That's a screw up I won't soon forget, and a lesson never to let oneself get rushed. I should have declined the "immediate" and just waited another minute or so.
 
It appears from the registration that N316MG does not belong to the flight instructor.
The FAA registry still shows the previous owner, who stated, above, that he had sold it a month prior to the accident.
 
Well I guess in a way none of it something to scream bloody murder if you isolate the view to thoughts of having 6000ft of tarmac available and so you can take your time. Yet these things get filed away and come back to bite.

My own view on take offs generally is that you use all the power because then your climb performance is improved and the day the engine quits I have either cleared the thing I didn't want to hit and/or I have more height to sort out my issue. It is why I don't like the more recent trend where some are advocates of "take off power" where it means something less than full throttle which is done to make things easier for students, especially in the wheel balance phase.

The other element about training without the use of full power is that not only can you never achieve the POH take off numbers [which all makes a mockery of student exams that talk about performance...none of them talk about using full throttle because in the past that part has been a given!] but the day the student becomes a pilot in his own right he has two potential snags waiting. The first with his muscle memory / default what it is - he isn't used to going through the detent, and so doesn't. The second is he now needs to use all of the power available to him in order to take off successfully and now the process and speed of actions is a shock.
Part of the FAA practical test standards is a short field takeoff.

Part of the knowledge test is reading performance charts.

As a flight instructor I am required to go over all the wrong answers on the knowledge test.

The accident pilot was a student pilot signed off for solo and is not expected to have well developed judgment. That is why it was a supervised solo.

I typically only supervise the first few solo flights and after that I just ok the client’s flight plan based on the current weather.

When I give introductory lessons in The Predator I often don’t have the client use full power on his early takeoffs to slow down the elements of the takeoff procedure on the 8,000 foot long runway that is near sea level.

Use of full throttle depends on conditions, the client’s aptitude and experience.
 
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