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Are Turbine Engines More Reliable?
Yes, with a huge caveat. As I’ve il- lustrated, the turbine engine certainly fails less than the piston. But the sta- tistics of the turbine and piston world are not altogether different. Why? I think there are two reasons why: pilot experience and power rollback.
Engine failures in piston engines usually don’t cause fatal accidents. Most piston engine failures result in a controlled landing. Now, that doesn’t mean that the airplane f lies again, but it does mean the pilot lives and gets to go flying again. Engine failures are not the nemesis of fatal accidents. The stall/spin scenario is the fatal sce- nario that every pilot should know to understand and avoid. An engine failure can certainly lead to a stall/spin accident if the pilot flubs the engine failure, but the engine failure was not the deadly event.
In the PA46 world, I’d like to report that the turbines have a much better fatal accident safety record than the
piston versions, but that is not the case. It seems that the turbine pilot causes fatal accidents just as often as the pis- ton pilot. But, it is not because of an engine failure, it is because of the pilot mishandling the airplane and causing a stall/spin accident.
The other event that causes acci- dents in the turbine world is the power rollback. In a turbine, there is the po- tential that the power can “roll back” to idle and the engine won’t respond to power lever movements. It seems that the turbine engine airplanes certainly have fewer engine failures, but they seem to have a lot of power rollbacks that are mishandled by the pilot.
A single-engine turbine pilot will always have a Manual Override (MOR) switch or lever to control the engine in a power rollback scenario, but it also seems that the MOR is either fumbled or not even used when the rollback occurs. Every turbine pilot, either in a single or multi-engine turbine, should fully understand the power roll- back scenario. Embarrassingly for the
turbine community and the CFI cadre that train the turbine community, it appears there is a serious lack of un- derstanding of the power rollback.
So, is the turbine more reliable? Yes! But, the turbine pilot had better un- derstand the power rollback because the rollback is a real threat and nulli- fies the huge reliability advantage of a turbine over a piston.
Stay tuned for Part II in the May issue with more insights and considerations surrounding turbine performance, opera- tion and maintenance.
Joe Casey is an FAA-DPE and an ATP, CFI, CFII (A/H), MEI, CFIG, CFIH, as well as a retired U.S. Army UH60 standardization instruc-tor/ examiner. An active instructor in the PA46 and King Air markets, he has accumulated 14,300-plus hours of flight time, with more than 5,200 dual-given as a flight instructor. Contact Joe at joe@flycasey.com or 903.721.9549.
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April 2022 / TWIN & TURBINE • 13