"Paul Tomblin" wrote in message
...
I was doing my BFR last night in my club's Piper Lance (in case you're not
familiar: it has retractable gear and a IO-540 fuel injected engine). We
finished up with a bunch of touch and goes, demonstrating short, soft,
etc. The last landing, the instructor pulled the throttle and had me do a
forced landing. I had no trouble making the runway, and rolled off the
runway and over the hold short line. As I was tuning the ground frequency
on the radio, the engine died. And I was unable to restart it and neither
was the instructor - I ended up having to call the FBO to tow me back to
the tie down line.

It wasn't until some hours later that it hit me - during the forced
approach, I had the throttle at idle, the mixture at rich and the boost
pump on. Which is exactly how you prime it for a cold start - except for
starting you only do it for about 3 seconds, and this was for the whole
duration of the forced approach. So I figure I probably flooded it. So
what's the answer? Do you turn off the boost pump when doing practice
forced approaches? What about normal approaches? Does that mean turning
on the boost pump has to become a normal action on go-arounds and touch
and goes?

Very interesting scenario. The procedure I was taught in the Warrior was to
turn the boost pump off at 500' AGL on the climb out. . You turn it back on
again during downwind landing checks ( 1000' AGL) , So if I was doing a go
around the boost pump would already be on. Our forced landing practice was
almost always done from about 3000 ft or higher. although a couple of times
my instructor pulled the power on downwind but before I had done the checks
, so booster pump would be off, and obviously you wouldnt turn it on again.
Occaisionally he would pull power after takeoff but just momentarily to
check that I would lower the nose immediately. So in short I have never been
faced with your situation where the power was pulled after you have set up
for landing with the boost pump on.
But it does make sense to me that this might result in flooding the engine.
I suspect you are right about turning off the boost pump, but I will be
looking out for some more experienced advice here.
Terry