How we escaped an in-flight engine failure by just two weeks

OK, what happened may not be as dramatic as the title of this post would like you to believe. I'll let you be the judge of that. Hey, after all, that's what comments are for :-) The story is as follows.

My better half and myself finally made it to Keswick Island during the Easter week-end. This was a follow-up holiday from last year's Christmas holidays which had been cut short due to exceptionally bad weather.


We flew up to Mackay in a Qantas Dash-8, then flew over to Keswick Island in a single-engine Piper Cherokee 6 chartered through Australasian Jet. This is a short 15-minute flight, with beautiful views of the Mackay coast and nearby islands. The approach to the landing strip is rather interesting, right in-between Keswick and St Bees Island.

We spent three beautiful days at the Keswick Island Guest House thanks to the excellent hospitaly, genuine friendliness, cooking and singing skills of our hosts Bryan and Lynn. In the course of that long week-end we got to meet each and every one of the nine inhabitants of the island. We even appeared on the Keswick Island Kapers blog edited by Eva. You will have to search the page for my first name to find us.


On the way back we took another Cherokee to Mackay, then a JetStar A320 back to Brisbane.

A couple of weeks later I picked up the Courier Mail (Brisbane's main newspaper) in the office and found an article titled Female pilot, 21, in 'textbook ditching' which started with

A 21-year-old female pilot on her first day on the job has performed a "textbook ditching" to save the lives of her four passengers in the sea off Mackay. All five on board survived when the Cherokee Piper 6 crashed into the sea 200m off Squeaky Beach on Carlisle Island just after 2pm today.

Mackay? Cherokee? This sounded familiar. How many Cherokees doing charter flights can there be in Mackay? We had flown on two of them, VH-ZMP and VH-VSN . I looked up the ATSB database, and there it was:

AO-2008-22: Piper Aircraft Corp PA-32-300, VH-ZMP, Brampton Island Qld. It was reported that the aircraft ditched after takeoff from Brampton Island aerodrome. The investigation is continuing.

Oops... that was the Cherokee we flew in two weeks before on our way to Keswick Island... The pilot seems to have done an awesome job ditching the plane safely and getting the passengers out without anyone getting seriously injured or worse. She can even be seen sporting a smile in a picture taken in the rescue helicopter, despite the multiple bruises on her face. That's picture 9 in this gallery.

To the best of my knowledge, that's the closest I've come so far to an in-flight engine failure in a single-engine aircraft. Two weeks between our flight and the final flight of VH-ZMP may sound like a big enough time interval. But if you think about it in terms of engine time, it's probably only a dozen hours we're talking about. A bit too close for comfort.

Which brings up the eternal question, what would I have done in the same situation? I can't honestly answer, but one's thing for sure: it's all about training and keeping a cool head. I should take a 172 out to Bribie Island one of those days to practice forced landings. It's been a while since I last did that, and I clearly remember that my last forced landing drills left a lot to be desired. Going through the checks, briefing passengers and making the mayday call was all OK, it's picking a field and planning a glide approach to it that could do with more practice. Of course, this is precisely the part of the forced landing you do not want to screw up. Training, training, training. Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage.

Double Bummer thanks to Crappy Queensland Summer Weather

We’ve been getting pretty crappy weather in the coastal areas of Queensland for the last couple of weeks, and it doesn’t look like things will get better anytime soon. Not only did the weather conspire to shorten our holidays last week, but it will most likely mean the cancellation of my two flying lessons planned for this week.

So if I can’t fly I’ll do the next best thing, blog about flying. And if I get really desperate I’ll resort to going solo to the training area in CAVOK conditions using the flight simulator at home.

About a week ago we left Brisbane on well-deserved holidays to the other side of the tropic, yet still in Queensland. We flew to Mackay in a Jetstar A320 then made our way to Airlie Beach in a Greyhound bus. On December 24th we embarked on Whitsunday Magic, a 113ft three-masted Schooner, for a three-day cruise around the Whitsunday Islands. We had an awesome Christmas Day on Whitehaven Beach followed by a not-less-awesome Christmas lunch onboard. The weather was good, but as you can see on the picture above, clouds were starting to come in.

Boxing Day was really bad, with continuous rain, big waves, and the ship oscillating in pitch pretty badly (I’m sure sea people have a proper name for that). We managed to go snorkelling in the rain in the morning, and I went diving in the afternoon at Cave Coves near Cook Island. As expected, the visibility underwater was bad with low light, but I was happy I could spot a few species of fan coral not found in the (relatively) colder waters near Brisbane. We also saw a few beautiful nudibranchs and flatworms. One good thing was the water temperature at 28 degrees.

On Thursday the rain didn’t stop for the whole day. As my girlfriend’s father would say, Heute regnet es nur einmal, i.e. it only rained once today. We were back onshore in Airlie Beach around lunchtime and later hopped on the Greyhound back to Mackay. The driver chose to screen the movie The Rundown. For some weird reason, the title of the movie was changed in Australia and the UK to Welcome to the Jungle. Suffice to say the only redeeming feature of the movie is a fantastic flying scene over moutains in the Amazonian Jungle in a small high-wing taildragger.


Now, the initial plan was to take a short 10-minute flight on Friday morning from Mackay to Keswick Island and spend two nights at Keswick Island Guest House. When we showed up at Australasian Jet in Mackay we were told that all flights to Keswick Island had been grounded for the last two days, and that today was probably not going to be any different. We still waited a couple of hours in the hope that winds would fall but by about 10AM we had to give up. We decided to shorten our holidays and get back to Brisbane. The pressure chart for that day shows a strong low over the Coral Sea. This low is the east-most point of a monsoon trough whose west-most end is another low off the coast of North-Western Australia that would become tropical cyclone Melanie over the next days.


We could have taken a Jetstar flight leaving in the next hour but $500 per person for a one-way flight is more than I am ready to pay for air travel, however convenient. So we decided instead to take a later Qantas flight for less than half the price. But the bargain came with strings attached. Flight QF2307 is actually flown by a Dash-8 and could be called the Queensland Flying Omnibus. It leaves Cairns at 12:40PM and stops in Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton and Gladstone before reaching Brisbane at 6:05PM. Needless to say, my better half was a lot less excited than I was at the prospect of spending the next three hours in a turboprop with a fair chance of turbulence and two more landings and take-offs than necessary.


The flight was one hour late in Mackay and we had to perform the infamous “dash for the dash” under the rain to board the plane. The runway was wet as we took off. The flight to Rocky turned out to be very smooth, cruising at 17,000 ft between two layers of clouds. I had a window set with a great view of the right engine and landing gear, which would have turned into a rather spectacular and dangerous vantage point if the right landing gear had collapsed like in this recent SAS flight. A very good write-up was written by Sam of Blogging at FL250, who is himself a former Dash-8 pilot.

We refuelled in Rocky and then took off again for the 25-minute leg to Gladstone, and after that it was off to Brisbane. We arrived from the north-west, flew abeam Redcliffe on our left, then followed the shore of Bramble Bay and finally landed on Runway 14.

Since we came back last Friday I’ve been keeping an eye on the weather forecast. And it does not look good for flying tomorrow Wednesday and on Friday. The low over the Coral Sea that shortened our holidays is still there and produces rain and strong south-easterly winds in Redcliffe. Remember, winds blow clockwise around a low pressure area in the Southern Hemisphere.

Today the weather observation in Redcliffe gives SSE winds of 25-30 knots gusting at 35. Given that the runway orientation is 07-25, this means almost a direct crosswind. The maximum crosswind component for the 152 is 15 knots, to say nothing of my own ability to deal with crosswinds, so that in itself means no flying tomorrow.

If that was not enough, the forecast for Area 40 reads:

STRONG TO GALE FORCE WINDS IN THE LOWER LEVELS SEA, COAST AND ADJACENT RANGES, WITH ISOLATED SEVERE TURBULENCE.

and the visibility in showers is forecasted at 3000m and 4000m in drizzle. That’s not even VMC which requires at least 5000m visibility below 10000ft.

So that’s probably a no-go for tomorrow. My hope for Friday is that, with the wind as forecasted at 20 knots from the east, the crosswind component will be acceptable. On the other hand, heavy rain is forecasted too, which means we may have to part with VMC.

Fingers crossed that I can fly at least once this week, otherwise I will have time to perform an upgrade on my home PC (the first one in four years) to bring it to an acceptable level to run X-Plane. More on flightsims in future posts hopefully.