I learned 2 days ago that a well known plane of the parking Lima has fallen down between lerins Island justa after departure. This twin comanche suffer a dual loss of power, and the pilot managed to ditch without injury (kudos to him), no passengers.
The plane lies in 20 meters of water.
The next morning, some more incidents happened, the most important being an engine loss of power after take-off by a jodel d150. The pilot could land just after lift off and the plane stopped just in the fence.
The avgas pump is closed for investigation as you may guess, until Monday at least.
Some pics of the place
Holy crap! Having a dual loss in a twin is so exceedingly rare. This really sounds like contaminated fuel. Then again – Cannes isn’t exactly a quiet little farm strip where the bowser gets filled once in a blue moon. Wonder what’s going on.
Many planes have refuelled until the pump did close for investigation. I think they could contact all pilots and it seems there is no more incidents.
It’s a real luck that no other planes did crash, actually many engine have run rough after refuelled. The twinco had tip tanks which could have made it more vicious.
This is very frightening. Jet A1? (I own a twin Comanche and can think if very few reasons for a double engine failure).
Water in the fuel?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Water in the fuel?
Can’t imagine several pilots not noticing during preflight.
Depends out of how many pilots…
We can’t conclude anything yet, but some planes that refuelled with avgas did suffer from roughness to massive loss of power. No problem with jetA and i doubt ot was water. Anyway I have never seen a pilot doing a tank drain after refuel. That may be an error, but I have almost seen a drop of water in November 2019, nothing since, but it was before filling the tanks.
greg_mp wrote:
Anyway I have never seen a pilot doing a tank drain after refuel
You’ve never seen me doing a preflight then! Seriously – the most important time to drain / check the fuel is AFTER fueling. The only problem is that water that’s suspended in fuel takes some time to settle, so if you drain immediately after fueling you prob99 won’t see it. Less of an issue if the fuel truck comes to you, much more of course if you’ve got a conga line of airplanes behind you at a self-serve pump. In my case I guess I do it about 80-90% of the time.
