My engine failure followed by forced landing...

Job well done! You can be proud, thanks for sharing and stay safe.

Well done and congratulations on the best possible outcome. I find it quite rich that some people tried to berate you after this incident in which you obviously did absolutely nothing wrong.

lenthamen wrote:

Flying strictly in VFR conditions also improves safety…

I guess in VMC the survival rate should be close to 90% with a SEP capable of slow flight such as C182. At night not very high.

It will be interesting to see how your “state of mind” develops. I had a temporary engine failure a few years ago and there were 3 crashes of pilots at my airfield in a very short time and especially the ditching did have a strong impact on me. Until today I do not feel comfortable in my SEP. I did a MEP rating after that but don’t have a MEP and lost currency on the rating…

denopa wrote:

what makes people less likely to post an event like this, in your experience? Fear of being judged/ having missed something?

Probably fear of being judged by the armchair quarterbacks, and also fear of saying the wrong thing and having the regulator seize on it and use it to prosecute you with your own words. The first fear is probably a lot more justified than the last, but the last one can have very damaging consequences should it ever come to pass.

Aviathor wrote:

Well, when you are down low, stressed and have to envisage meeting the ground in the best possible way, you need to prioritise where you want to direct your attention. I know exactly how that must have felt.

This is true. When you’re low it’s absolutely paramount to concentrate on aviating – unfortunately, there’s little time for running through checklists or trying for a restart.

I’ve had an engine failure at very low altitude (departing New Orleans Lakefront about 2 years ago, with nothing except alligator infested swamp in front of us) – at something like 450 feet. I wasn’t PIC at the time, I was in the right seat, but even with two pilots what was obvious is that the person who’s flying must NOT be distracted from maintaining airspeed. Fortunately for us we got a couple of spurts of power out the engine, enough to complete “the impossible turn” and land back on the runway (we also had taken the full length of the runway for takeoff, and it’s about 1.5km long, which meant that without the spurts of power we should have made it somewhere on airfield property, which is better than landing in alligator-infested swamp).

We also had an incident a couple of weeks ago where a pilot of an aircraft with a recently rebuilt engine got smoke in the cockpit and thought he had an engine fire – he shut off the fuel and put it in a field. It turned out to be a faulty heater shroud, but given that you’re in the air and have a suspected fire in a fabric covered aircraft, I can’t fault his decision to just shut the thing down and get on the ground as soon as possible.

The thing is I think if you keep the aircraft flying, and keep the angle of arrival minimal, and keep flying it till everything stops, you stack the odds in your favour. (Reminding me of a story I had heard about a large turbine helicopter that had a tail rotor failure and landed at an airport with a high forward speed, and proceeded to pirouette down the runway – ATC asked if they were OK, and the pilot replied “I don’t know, I ain’t done crashing yet”)

Robin_253 wrote:

If you could share some statistics I think it would make up for a nice new thread.

We’ve had that here (several times?) I suppose @Alexis will chime in on this topic.

Robin_253 wrote:

that deploying a shute is risky

I agree on that to a certain degree, but it turned out to be the best option at least for many.

I think the OP did everything right in the circumstances.
If a few thousand feet higher, more time could be given to try a restart of the engine. The engine did not really fail, it was gasping for air due to a collapsed filter gasket. The instinct to go full rich (as trained) does no good in this case.
One of the items we learned at the APS live seminar is to do a mixture sweep until you might find a position where the engine may develop most power for the given configuration. You can do this while looking outside, just moving the mixture slowly from whatever setting to more lean, if it doesn’t help, go more rich.
The engine was still running, but with much reduced power, you could have been way too lean or way too rich.
These items are best considered way in advance, before you need it. If the real thing happens, it would be in the back of your mind and come quickly when required.

That may be true, but at the altitude the pilot was at, there was no time for diagnosis.

The correct action at that point is to make a successful forced landing. Only once that is assured do you have time to work on restoring the engine power. Clearly given the altitude that power was lost, there would have been no time to work on th engine.

Everything was done 100% correctly, and exactly as we are all trained.

Good job lenthaman! Better to keep the aircraft under control and do a great landing in a field than entering an undesired attitude you can not get out of even with a restarting engine.
These kind of incidents will stay in your head for a long time, but don´t think about it too much. There´s always another path of action one could have chosen, but you did well enough on that day! The airplane and more importantly you are still in one piece, there´s nothing more you can ask for!