Around the World - Leg 2 - Egelsbach to Podgorica - ENGINE FAILURE - emergency landing at Bolzano
Tonight’s flight was supposed to take me from Egelsbach in Germany to Podgorica in Montenegro. I chose the Black Square King Air 350, thinking “I haven’t flown that in ages - what could go wrong?”
An engine failure - that’s what could go wrong.
Let’s start with the route. I mapped out a VOR and NDB route across Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hertzegovena, and finally Montenegro - as follows:
EDFE DKB WLD MAH OZE RIV LBL ZAG LAK KIS MSR DBK LYPG
The plan was filed with Simbrief, and pulled into the TDS GTNxi withing the aircraft. Everything went like clockwork (apart from a couple of missing waypoints in the GTNxi, but we worked around that).
About an hour into the flight I stepped away to make a coffee. On my return the aircraft was moving around more than you might expect, so I started checking gauges - and noticed RPM on the left engine was down. It took more than a few moments to realise the left engine power was at zero - it had failed - curiously with no warnings lit up on the annunciator panel.
I feathered the engine and shut the generator down in short order, and started looking at the map. We had passed Bolzano a few minutes previously, so it seemed like a natural emergency landing location.
Ten minutes later - after crabbing the aircraft quite spectacularly through the mountains to the south east of Bolzano - we landed in one piece.
Above you can see the track on LittleNavMap - illustrating the turn overhead Bolzano, followed by a route through the hills to get back on one engine. Not fun.
The picture in Volanta would be even better if it modelled the moutains in 3D:
Looking through the failure modelling in the King Air, there were no listed failures, which makes me wonder what exactly happened. I suspect a bug, but I can’t be that sure, because I haven’t flown the aircraft in a long time. I might have forgotten something. We were in the cold air at 11,000ft above the mountains at the time of the failure. Maybe that had a bearing on it. I’ll never know.
The important thing? I got the plane down in one piece.
We live to fly another day :)
Here’s the track from Volanta:
https://fly.volanta.app/flights/6444fb0c-23c2-4763-801c-e85f17d452d1
Oh… nearly forgot… here’s the video!