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Throttle stuck wide open - should this be a real problem?

Here

I would think one could use the mixture to bring the power back. Is there some other issue?

The engine is likely to be very rough when using the mixture to bring the power back far enough to land, but I can’t think of anything else.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

You could do, my inclination would be to just shut it down abeam of the numbers and do a normal glide approach. I’d probably keep it a bit tighter than normal – I’d rather err on the side of having too much energy rather than not enough, but with a tailwheel aircraft I can do a wheel landing at higher than normal touchdown speed if it becomes necessary, and I’m confident that I could make a normal landing on some part of our kilometer-long runway.

Andreas IOM

I had something similar in the Aztec. The induction system developed a leak which effectively gave me a minimum of 25".

I flew to short finals and shut down and all was fine.

EGKB Biggin Hill

Or you could use the mags as on an old(really old) aircraft. Power is adjusted by changing the mag setting.

ESSZ, Sweden

Engines stuck on full power also happened on a Eclipse 500 jet.. They got it down in one piece too!

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

With a nervous pilot, having her play with mixture may not have been considered a good idea. Too aggressive, stops engine and may not react properly to restart it.

EGTK Oxford

A friend of mine had to deal with this once. He shut down the engine and dealt with it pretty much as described by alioth. No big deal.

Couldn’t one just switch the ignition off? I guess it depends on the aircraft but that’s how my instructor turned off the engine on our Aquila, which has no manual mixture control, to create a power-off landing situation.

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

MedEwok wrote:

Couldn’t one just switch the ignition off?

Sure. The problem is, that fuel will keep flowing and if one needs to turn the engine back on, i.e. because the gliding approach was less than perfect and a second attempt is necessary, all that fuel will either have fouled up the plugs or detonates with a loud bang when the ignition is turnded back on… In your plane which has no mixture control there is obviously little choice – apart from the fuel selector which could have been turned off instead of the ignition. But what do I know about Aquilae…

And I remember the incident report of that Eclipse mentioned above. Due to some software glitch, the FADECs of both engines went to maximum thrust on approach and would not react to pilot inputs. After a go-around the pilot shut down one engine, probably by closing the fuel valve. He then did an approach on one engine (still way too fast because it was at full thrust) and shut that one down on short final. The aircraft was damaged in the hard landing that resulted from that but no one was injured. Yet this incident was one more nail in the coffin of the Eclipse…

Last Edited by what_next at 24 Mar 20:25
EDDS - Stuttgart

I thought the stuck throttle was part of the PPL – it was when I did mine.

Last Edited by Fuji_Abound at 24 Mar 22:15
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