Perhaps it was a motor glider. Their engines stop quickly when the pilot
feathers the prop. And then the plane just glides away!

jerry

"Roger Long" om wrote in
message .. .
Our summer cottage is on Queechy Lake which is near the 26 runway
extension
of PSF (Pittsfield, MA) and close enough that planes are often climbing or
transitioning to pattern entry speeds when they go over. The lake is
picturesque so low level buzz jobs are not uncommon.

I was napping last Friday afternoon when the sound of a plane, a Lycoming
O-320 by the sound of it, brought me into semi-consciousness. It was
circling low and throttling up as it climbed out of low passes. Suddenly,
the engine went silent. It was at fairly high RPM and stopped with what
sounded like a faint "chunk". That brought me bolt upright and wide
awake.
I threw on my shoes and ran the couple hundred yards down to the lake
expecting to find that a plane had ditched. No one had seen or heard
anything. I decided that I must have been dreaming.

I was sitting with some other people about three hours later and I asked
if
anyone had seen a plane flying low over the lake. It turned out that one
person had. It was circling low over the other end of the lake and
waggling
its wings. The person who saw it said that the engine suddenly quit and
it
disappeared over the hill just after the engine went silent. That spooked
me.

When I got back to shore, I called the State Police to see if there were
any
searches or overdue aircraft reports. They were totally uninterested.

Thinking about it later, I wish I had been more aggressive. Pulling the
throttle back suddenly wouldn't make the engine on my 172 sound like that.
The transition from power to silence was instant. Flying into trees
during
a botched pull up from a buzz job is the best explanation for what I
heard.
Then again, I was asleep. Presumably, if they were buzzing and waving
wings
at someone on the ground, people were watching.

If anyone sees anything about a missing plane on the MA/NY border that I
missed, please let me know.

--
Roger Long






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