This has deteriorated into a lower deal than even I thought it would.
If BoB wants to fly behind a Lyc, a Continental or even a real real
aircraft engine-that is a PT-6 or a Screamin' 331 Garrett-hey, it's
his money. This is America. But if he's going to hang out and badmouth
those of us who would rather not we'll just killfile him.

I had no idea what killed Steve Wittman, I never said it was the
engine. It wasn't. He was a wealthy man-he would not have been able to
marry a woman 45 years his junior otherwise, I think-and he loved to
build, he could as easily have bought any GA airplane he wanted.

Dave Blanton had over 50 forced landings in his career and didn't
think they were that big a deal. When he started flying they weren't.
Wittman had as many or more. What's telling is that today, a good many
pilots don't survive their first one, and that's considered as normal.
That bothers me a lot. A mentality that is OK for turbine transports
and tactical jets with ejection seats is not OK for light aircraft.

We're not thinking too clearly here. There are two sensible
mentalities here for single-engine flying- the engine can't quit, or
that it can. The former was a proposition accepted by U-2 pilots over
Russia and the astronauts that flew the Apollo LM (and the CSM as
well-no TEI burn meant they'd die in lunar orbit), but they had
powerplants made to the limit of human endeavor at their respective
times. There is no goddamned way in Hell you can say that about
Lycoming and Continental today. They are admittedly made as cheaply as
the FAA will allow.

The other is, "the engine will quit". Sooner or later it will. So we
build an aircraft with some semblance of crashworthiness and also one
we think, in our best judgment, we-not Yeager or Armstrong or Engle-we
can put somewhere when it quits and walk out. We train with this idea,
maybe we get a sailplane rating, maybe we do like Dave says and
execute a few practice power off landings somewhere isolated and then
do it for real-an idea absolutely abhorrent to any time-building young
CFI. At least we think about it good and hard. Lycomings quit,
Continentals quit, even Pratts and Garretts and GE's and Rolls Royces
quit.