Real world throttle issue - recap

[ChrisS]

Reddit Link

How often do you guys practice stuff like this in your sims? I know I will often take a helicopter up and give myself a Q limit or certain power setting that I won't let myself get past and see if I can still land safely, but I've never tried it on the fixed wing side.

Just in case you guys needed another excuse to get up on the network and try something new and challenging.

[Mark Hargrove]

I practiced a failure like this once with my CFI just before I took the PPL exam. He "failed" the throttle linkage on me at top of climb -- wouldn't allow me to reduce throttle as I got ready to pull it back until I figured out how I was going to land. Since he was a high-time sailplane pilot, I knew how his devious mind worked. I continued in a slight climb to a position I knew I could make a safe landing from with a failed engine and then told him I was pulling mixture all the way out to kill the engine. He obliged by pulling the throttle to idle and I made a routine engine-out approach. He never had to give me any power back because I'd judged it correctly. It helped that he LOVED to fail the engine on me during the latter stages of my primary training and I'd practiced engine-out glides and turns plenty of times before the "full throttle only" scenario. I do remember that it threw me for a loop for a minute or so before I settled down and remembered that gliding was an option.