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Engine Failures in Agcat aeroplane.


I had a cat that had gone down several times.Once with Hugh McIntosh who had never had a forced landing before. Then he took off again and in 30 sec she quit again. The rest of us who flew it had been down several times before but not poor Hugh.

There is sometimes confusion in the assembly of an ag cat. The fuel tanks cross to a vent line and if these are assembled incorrectly the vent can be wrongly coupled with the opposite vent and thus the fuel tank to the other fuel tank. In other words, no venting. Well after exhaustive testing I was convinced this was not the case.However in desperation I vented the tanks straight out the top. No more trouble. Lost probably 2 gals of gas each time we refuelled but no more problems. Never did figure out what the problem was but since the trouble stopped it didn’t really matter any more.

We had another engine that continually quit. Funny thing. It would give about 20 seconds notice by moving in the mount. The time allowed one to position for the inevitable forced landing. Even more odd was after landing one would taxi to the end of the paddock and takeoff to resume ops again.

Well as you might expect we were all a bit nervous about this engine, so we simply changed it.

Good old reliable Eric Noonan reported pinched mag leads. It looks likely that I had changed the mag (and I was good and quickat doing this) and pinched the leads in clamping up the mag covers. Silly thing was if myself or any other pilot experiencing this had done a mag check, one would have found it flew good on just one. One could have resumed then by switching back to both. You know we all did learn this at flying school years before. I spose at ground level we were most interested in having a successful forced landing.