by JBaymore » Sat Aug 14, 2004 9:43 am
I had a totally unexpected inflight "emergency" happen once in the default C172 a number of weeks ago. Still do not know "what or why" it happened. Never happened before...and has never happened since. If it were a real aircraft....... it'd be in the shop until I DID know why ;).
I was hand flying the aircraft at about 3500 ft. in summer weather daytime VFR with engine rpms at about 2100. Clean, and trimmed straight and level for cruise. Light winds, no real turbulance. Real weather set with the 15 minute updates.
Scanning the panel, suddenly my fuel flow indicator started to show a slight decrease...then shortly after that (couple of seconds) my engine started to noticeably lose rpms. Then after a couple more seconds it quit completely! The tanks were still full. Adjustments to mixture and throttle did not seem to do anything to prevent that engine failure for me.
As it was starting to happen I immediately checked all the other gauges and saw that nothing else obvious seemed amiss, and I started thinking about an emergency landing location on the ground nearby as I kept an eye on airspeed and trim. Then I tried to do an air restart of the engine.
After a number of tries on the switch and adjusting the throttle and mixture ........ the engine finally restarted. After about 15 seconds .... fuel flow indications returned to normal and rpms stabilized. The engine then seemed to be operating normally.
I found the nearest airport and landed with no more problems. That plane has showed all "green" ever since.
I did NOT have any "failures" set in the sim. I went into that setting and checked to see if something had been inadvertantly activated... and it hadn't.
Weird. But it was a GREAT;) real world type practice experience that you couldn't have planned.
One thought that MIGHT relate to the above. If the real world weather had installed a "zone" of barometric pressure that made the plane think it was at say 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 ft or more.... THAT lack of air could have caused some of the symptoms that I experienced. But why would it correct itself within a span of only about 1 minute?
best,
......................john

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