Failures are freaking awesome!
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Story time:
I’m flying to Marrakesh (world tour following F1 races and checking out historical circuits) when suddenly the right engine RPM starts to drop. A quick look at the tablet informs me that the right propeller governor has failed. Looks like to would be a good time to divert to the nearest airport but hey, it’s a sim and I’m curious to see what will come of it, so I decide to try operations with a single engine and continue to Marrakesh.
Now, I’m not a pilot and I’ve spent very little time looking at emergency procedures. I decide to feather the right propeller, stop the engine and stop its generator. At first all is looking good; the Starship keeps chugging along fine with a single engine and I’m proud of myself.
Then, as I begin my approach to Marrakesh, things start to unravel. I realize that I forgot to crossfeed the engine and I now have a significant fuel imbalance. Then all my screens except the SDU flicker and go dark. Is a single generator not enough to power the avionics and I drained the battery without realizing? Now I lost my glide slope indicator and I do not how fast I’m flying. Looks like I can restart the generator and bring the screens back to life, but it only lasts a few seconds before going dark again. Between these flickers I realize that I’m close to stalling speed and I’m flying crooked. Turns out my right prop is not feathered anymore… Did I flick the autofeather switch by mistake or is something else happening?
Well, I drop the gears, push the remaining engine to 90%+ torque and hope for the best. Landing ends up being fairly smooth, if a bit too fast. I'm actually sweating though...
I had a blast. I start to realize how little I know about emergency procedures and what goes on under the hood of the Starship. Now I’m looking forward to dig and learn more about all of that. What an awesome aircraft, thanks @Black-Square for all the work you’ve done on the failure points, it’s awesome!
Edit: Looks like I don't know how to add pictures in this forum...
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Nice. I left mine at "default" for now, the only failure I had was so minor that it wasn't noticeable. I have been fixing my engines to 100% regularly in order to learn exactly what I shouldn't be doing wrong. Maybe it's time to leave them be.
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I can't see the pictures right now, did you end up burning up the left generator once the right one went offline? I normally see ~60% usage on both generators, so if you didn't load shed I can imagine that the remaining one was pretty quickly overwhelmed.
@jmarkows Indeed, I dot not shed any load, thinking that a single generator would be sufficient (which was a dumb assumption, since as you pointed out both generators run at 60% during normal ops). Now I need to look into the manual and make some tests to see what I can safely shut down to keep flying with a single generator. That's awesome!
Propeller not feathering while the prop level was all the way down into feather mode is a bit of a mystery to me though...
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I saw in the manual that "If the opposite engine’s power is reduced below ~17% torque, both propellers will unfeather, and the autofeather system will be completely disabled". Maybe I ended up going below 16% torque on my left engine during descent, which caused the issue. But then, does that mean that in the event dual engine failure this plane cannot feather at all? I'm more familiar with piston engines that (I seem to recall) can be feathered in the event of engine failure.
@Marionettework That governor failure happened with my engine at 100% health, so I guess the risk is slim but not zero!
