Pilot Actually Tries The IMPOSSIBLE Turn

There's a reason this is called the impossible turn. This is an instructor pilot with a student. They're flying a Piper Archer aircraft. They're taking off out of DeKalb County airport. It's just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. When they hit about 100 feet above the ground, the engine starts to sputter and then they lose total engine power. And in that type of situation, you would assume right there that the best thing to do would be just turn around and land back at the airport that you took off from. But you can see they're going to go ahead and try to do that. And this is why it's called the impossible turn. Now, before I show you the rest of the video and talk about what happened and the reason why they ended up stalling the aircraft, I just want to let you know both of the individuals on this plane did survive. The instructor had some serious injuries and the student pilot had some minor injuries. Now we're going to take a look at the NTSB preliminary investigation report in just a second. But first I want to show you, I've tried to recreate this in Microsoft Flight Simulator and you'll have to forgive me because I've got a Cessna 172 loaded in here. I don't have the the Piper aircraft model loaded in Microsoft Flight Simulator because honestly I don't really use this other than to create these videos for you guys because I think it's very helpful to show you some of the things that the pilot is seeing, at least as close to a realistic representation as we can get in these types of situations. So taking off on runway 21R, you've got your control tower here over on the right hand side. And then I end up getting airborne a little further down the runway than where they actually get airborne from. But as soon as you get airborne, this is a very dense urban environment. So here we are at about 20 feet, 25 feet or so. We're going through about 50 feet. You're starting to pick up the city out in front of you. And then there we are at about 100 feet. And I'll go ahead and pause it right there. At that point, if you lose total engine power, you don't really have a lot of options. You're looking out in front of you and you see nothing but buildings everywhere. And certainly if you have no engine power at this point, you're not even going to make it beyond those buildings if you were to try to land on a road or something else in front of you. So really his only choice is to try to land on the grass out in front of him. If that's something he even considered, which I'm sure he did, or to maybe turn to the left here, which is what he did and try to aim for some of this grass area on the other side of the runway over here, which seemed like the most clear area at the time. Now, if we go to the aerial imagery for runway 21 left here at the airport, or sorry, 21 right, you can see this is what we're looking at here. This area of Microsoft Flight Simulator looks like a lot more than what it really is. That's not a lot of ground to be able to put an aircraft down. And if you're already at 100 feet doing about 60 to 70 knots, and these runways are very closely spaced together, so it's going to be very difficult to make that left-hand turn back around, especially if you have some sort of strong headwind when you're taking off that all of a sudden becomes a tailwind that's pushing you closer to the runway when you start to make that turn. But really he has no other option. You've got a parking lot here, which was probably have more cars in it most likely. You've got these roads out here that you might consider, but at 100 feet above the ground and you're still over the runway, you're probably not going to make it to these roads down here. Now, there was an incident that was very similar to this with an instructor and a student pilot that experienced an engine malfunction that I've talked about in some of my other videos. However, there are a few key points that I haven't talked about before with regard to that. So I want to share that with you guys. You can find this video on Baron Pilot's channel, and we'll take a look at this because you should definitely go check it out. I honestly think it's probably the best 60 seconds of aviation that you can find on the internet in terms of lessons that you can learn from this. So they've just gotten airborne from attempting a touch and go, so they're a little bit higher in terms of the altitude and a better energy state than the aircraft that we just saw a few seconds ago. And right here is when the engine starts to sputter. Now the student pilot does the best thing possible, and she basically hands over the controls to the instructor. And within, you know, two to three seconds of that happening, he's made a split second decision on what he's going to do. And that's the most important thing for any pilot. When you're flying around in the pattern, when you're doing a takeoff, anytime you're going to go flying, you need to have a game plan for what are you going to do if you lose an engine on takeoff or if you lose an engine while you're doing a go around or a touch and go. Where are you going to land that aircraft? Are you going to land in straight ahead in front of you? Are you going to try to make a turn back around for the airport? And if you do try to make that turn for the airport, what altitude and airspeed is your cutoff point for determining that you can successfully make it back around to the airfield and land? Now in this situation, I refer to it as the almost impossible turn because you can see the engine is still producing power. And he even says that because he recognized the engine was still working a little bit, he wanted to try to milk that engine and get the aircraft turned back around as quickly as possible to point at the airfield. That way, if they did lose complete engine power, he did have some more options available to him. And you can see it's just really struggling. But at this point right here, he realizes that, you know, as he's coming into land, he's just too high right there. You can see he's too high, he's going too fast. And so what he ends up having to do is basically put in a full left boot of rudder with some right control input there to sideslip the aircraft in order to lose altitude and try to slow back down in time to get lined up on the runway center line in order to land. And even right here, he's still to the left, but he's trying to keep that sideslip in so that way they don't end up floating all the way down to the other end of the runway. You know, this is stuff that pilots need to think about and talk about so they have a game plan for what they're going to do. Now, according to the NTSB preliminary report, this happened on February 16, 2023. It was about 2.30 in the afternoon, and they did a preflight inspection, start up taxi, and run up. They were cleared for departure. It says for on runway 21 left, but if we look at the ADS-B data, you can see it was departing on runway 21 right. And in the video, you can even tell that they're departing on runway 21 right. So I'm sure the NTSB will clean that up with their final report once the investigation is complete. Full power was applied. They had standard callouts. Airspeed was alive. They had a normal rotation and climb out. And at about 1,100 feet MSL or 100 feet above the ground, the engine sputtered and then lost total power. The instructor immediately reduced the angle of attack and scanned the area ahead and to the right for an emergency landing site. But seeing no safe options, he initiated an immediate and steep bank to the left and pitched the controls forward towards a large grass field. Now you can see that here in the video as he starts to make that left-hand turn, he's trying to find a place that he can put the aircraft down. If we look at the aerial imagery, it's going to be somewhere over here on the right is probably what he's hoping to be able to land in because he's definitely not going to make it all the way 180 degrees back around to land on runway three right. Really kudos to the pilot here because as he starts this turn, really the instinct I think for a lot of pilots would be to just try to pull back as hard as possible to try to make that turn work. And when you do that, you're very quickly going to exceed the critical angle of attack on the wing and stall the aircraft. And so he's very lucky that or he's, you know, just highly skilled and that he didn't stall the aircraft immediately and spin them into the ground. And so he's able to manage the angle of attack and the airspeed enough to get them pointed back in the right direction. He does a really good job actually, you know, considering the circumstances. And you can look, he almost makes it all the way back around, but unfortunately at this point just does not have the altitude left to do so. The left wing hits the ground first, shears the left wing off the aircraft, and then they come to a rest in the grass area. Overall, a fantastic job, but a lot of lessons learned from this one. It'll be interesting to see the NTSB final report. And if you enjoyed this video, be sure to check out another one on the channel and I'll see you next time.