Naturally failures are the last thing we want, but who has actually initiated a failure during their flight? Do you know what to do? Or just hope by pressing every switch and turning every knob your aircraft heals itself? Me personally haven’t done it yet, but it’ll be interesting to hear from others if they have set failures and what failure they set.
There are some failures that might go unnoticed unless alarmed like oil pressure loss. Engine failure might be obvious except in a twin. Unfortunately there are no emergency procedures for stock aircraft so if I had oil pressure loss I don’t know what I’d do. Land? (Also, there is no ability to let ATC know about an emergency.)
I think there are mostly pilot-induced failures than mechanical failures. Running out of fuel. Failure to switch fuel tanks. Pitot tube not heated. Carburetor ice. Gear-up landing. Failures can be complicated significantly if they occur at night or in IMC or both. Engine failure at night in IMC? No thanks!
You can get the POH for just about any aircraft online which will also include emergency procedures. You’re right in sim ATC is not built to handle this, nor is Pilot2ATC.
You could locate your nearest airport suitable for landing and then request vectors for straight in or other approaches.
Where’s your sense of adventure? lol
I set up a left engine oil pressure failure armed from 10-100 minutes on a 60 minute flight across North Carolina in the Working Title CJ4. It failed at top of climb and I was suprised how quickly the engine stopped working after the oil pressure was low, I was used to a car engine that will take some minutes to die.
I turned around and returned to my origin field with no issues although I needed strong rudder control to fight the yaw moment caused by unbalanced thrust. I also needed near max throttle on the remaining engine, which makes sense but was unexpected.
Note that failure config resets each flight which means I don’t take the time to set it up often. In X-plane I have global configs that have small chances of failure in every flight I take.
I did run out of fuel and made a successful forced landing on a daytime flight over Kenya
There seems to be IRL fuel contamination failures happening more often although still rare. Fuel contamination in a twin engine piston or jet results in both engines failing but not necessarily at the same time. When the first engine fails, pilots go through the emergency procedures for a failed engine. After several minutes when the second engine fails, do the pilots try restarting the second engine? Find somewhere to land? And single pilot twin engine failure is probably one of the ultimate challenges.
Another vey difficult failure challenge is to takeoff and climb to about 800-1000 ft then have an engine failure. Can the aircraft be flown back to the airport? At a low altitude there is no time to go through the emergency engine-out procedures.
Engine failure in a twin is very obvious, don’t think it would go unnoticed 
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.