Video: Engine out

“There’s that instantaneous startle factor where you just go, ‘What?’” Levy said. “Then you go into denial.” Within 90 seconds, however, the engine would lose power completely, and Levy was forced to put the airplane down in a farm field. Levy recorded the entire event on a pair of point-of-view video cameras, and he shared the images, as well as his lessons learned, in a candid discussion with the AOPA Air Safety Institute.

Moments after the first interruption, Levy’s engine quit again, this time for several seconds. He pulled up and out of the formation and declared an emergency. Levy, an airline captain and veteran airshow pilot, selected a farm field, turned toward it, and began preparing for an off-field landing. He rolled back the P–51’s sliding canopy, and then the Merlin engine roared back to life. He was only a couple miles from the airport. Perhaps the engine would keep running long enough for him to get there.

“When I saw the airfield appearing on my left side,” he said, “I thought, ‘I’ve got a chance here.’” With the engine cutting in and out, the airplane descended to about 500 feet above the ground on a tight left downwind, and air traffic controllers shouted on the radio to Levy warning him that his landing gear was still up.

“That’s when I made another mistake,” he said. “The chimpanzee in the back of your head hears an instruction and says, ‘I can do that.’ So, I put the gear down.”

The engine lost power again, and with the additional drag of the extended landing gear, Levy was beyond gliding distance from the runway. Also, he heard the whistling sound that the Mustang’s gun ports make when the wing is at high angles of attack and nearing an aerodynamic stall.

The runway was so close that Levy felt he could almost touch it. But it may as well have been thousands of miles away. Attempting to stretch a glide could be fatal, and it would require overflying a busy highway. He decisively turned away from the airfield, raised the landing gear, and extended full flaps. Levy said he followed legendary pilot R.A. “Bob” Hoover’s advice to fly the airplane “as far into the crash as possible.”

Levy bellied the stricken airplane into a farm field, and it slid to an abrupt stop in about 100 yards. The impact was so forceful that the canopy slammed forward, hitting the back of his head as the plexiglass was thrown clear of the airplane. Levy wasn’t seriously injured.

The cause of the engine failure is under investigation. The airplane is being repaired and is scheduled to fly again this year.

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