Planes fly best with their propellors

A friend of mine had an odd incident in his Piper Malibu, the prop fell off in flight! If anyone here has flown into Aspen then you know
how good a pilot you have to be to make this experience work out the way it did. He flew my son and me to the Indy F1 race last year in this plane, I'm glad it didn't happen then.



http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20071227/NEWS/27569632

 

I've heard of props loosing part of the blade, making for a shaky flight, but the WHOLE prop? Incredible survival story!

 

I have a wooden propellor standing in the corner of my living room that my dad found in a ditch when he was out for a walk.

He never did find the rest of the plane.

 

Wow.

 

Thats pretty crazy.

 

Glad he and his passengers are safe.

Yes, Aspen is one of the trickiest airports... he is lucky.

I seem to remember a problem they were having with the Malibu years ago, but my memory is hazy on this. I'd like to see the NTSB report.

 

Here is a true story of having the whole prop assembly come right off. Don't know if this name will ring a bell, but around Oklahoma City in the late 1980s, early 1990s one of the airshow pilots was a gentleman named Tom Jones. This was the guy who unfortunately crashed the Russian Sukoi stunt plane at the FAA airshow at Will Rogers world airport in the early 1990s - they said he probably passed out from heat stroke.

Anyway, his former plane was lost in an accident about 5 years earlier - it was a Pitts Special S1S. The engine had been modified from 260 hp to around 300 hp; and the prop hub carrier had been drilled through with six lightening holes midway out on the rim. During an airshow, this hub fractured from hole to hole where this lightenening mod had been done, and the whole prop, including the constant speed governer, immediately parted company from the aircraft.

The C/G was put off so much that the plane was no longer controllable, and it crashed into a T-hanger alongside the runway, destroying itself along with an innocent Beechcraft Baron that was parked inside. Tom walked away from it with nothing much more to report than some bruised ribs and cuts and abrasions. The FAA still has a video tape of this crash, and occasionally uses it in private pilot seminars as an educational item.

Amazing how strong those welded tubing fuselages can be, compared to aluminum mono construction.

Point here is that just the loss of propulsion is bad enough, but it may be that if you have a really light airplane with a really big prop, the loss of C/G balance can be just about as bad as losing power.

James