Carrie Rengers: Engine Failure at 6,000 Feet Over Kansas: Pilot Offers a Master's Class in What to Do

Most people probably would not describe a plane losing power at 6,000 feet above the ground as any sort of a lucky moment, but David Rolph does.

The co-founder of Sasnak Management — the company his son, Jon, now runs as Thrive Restaurant Group — flew from Jabara Airport at 8:30 a.m. on June 16. He was 30 minutes into his two-and-a-half-hour flight to Colorado Springs, about halfway between Pratt and Great Bend, when the 1960 Bonanza he shares with former Yingling Aviation president Jack Feiden started shaking violently.

“The greatest thing that happened was I was lucky enough to have a situation in which my skill could make a difference,” Rolph said. “A lot of times you get in a situation where it’s checkmate.”

He also credits what he calls the “600,000 square miles of landing field” that is western Kansas.

“There’s a reason that they . . . chose to build planes in Kansas.”

Rolph has been flying since 1979 in all kinds of planes, including gliders. He has almost 3,000 hours. His Bonanza is 60 percent into the life of its third engine.

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One of the trickiest parts of a flight is takeoff. It’s not usually being at cruising altitude on a clear day in a plane with plenty of fuel.

When the extreme bucking and jerking started, the engine lost about half of its power.

“It was like, ‘What?’ . . . It was so sudden and unexpected,” Rolph said.

He thought he might have lost part of the propeller. Rolph then apprised air traffic control at Kansas City Center, the Missouri-based control center that guides flights across Kansas, that he had to get on the ground quickly. He chose to turn north toward Great Bend so the wind would be behind him.

He switched fuel tanks and did “all the stuff that you do to try to fix the problem.”

“All of a sudden, the engine just seized, and the prop stopped.”

Rolph called it a freeing moment where he no longer had to try to restart the engine.

“Then I just totally focused on trying to find a place to land.”

He told Kansas City he was turning to the south so he could land into the wind.

“The wind velocity that you’re going into will reduce the ground speed that you have.”

‘Might as well be in a piano’

The crucial thing at this point was that Rolph wanted “to be flying the airplane, not falling.”

Otherwise, he said, “You might as well be in a piano.”

Rolph informed Kansas City he was going to make a dead-stick landing — a pilot term for an engine-out landing — onto a road or field.

He was over a road in Stafford County and saw that there was plenty of room to land between cars. However, the vehicles were going in either direction, so he couldn’t land there or his wings likely would have hit oncoming traffic.

Then Rolph saw another road to the west — what he now knows was 30th Street — but there were steel posts with reflectors. Since Rolph didn’t know what kind of shape the plane was in, he didn’t want to risk landing there and hitting the posts.

So instead, he “just side-slipped over to the wheat field” next to the road.

As he came in for the landing, Rolph knew he’d have to have enough altitude to clear some bales of wheat scattered at the edge of the field.

He “dumped all the flaps down” to slow the plane “and then pulled that yoke back in my lap and just hoped that I . . . could keep the nose gear up as long as I could to get as slow as I could.”

From lots of FlightSafety training and also from the glider lessons he took eight years ago, Rolph said he knew what it is like to not have power.

“You have that kind of experience, and you draw on that,” he said. “It may seem absolutely miraculous to you, but it’s physics to me.”

The incident — rare these days because engines are so reliable — lasted eight minutes. Rolph still doesn’t know what went wrong with the engine.

No fear

The Stafford County Sheriff’s Office arrived, and Rolph walked up to meet deputies at the road. A St. John veterinarian, Jim Doran, had stopped his pickup and was visiting with the others. Doran, who owns a 1965 Bonanza, had quickly assessed the situation: an airplane likely with no power landed in a field in a crosswind and was completely intact.

“I just set there and gave you three claps,” Doran told Rolph. “I didn’t know who you were, but you did good.”

Rolph mentioned to the deputies that he needed a way to get back to Wichita.

“Well, if you aren’t afraid to get back in a Bonanza, I’ll fly you back,” Doran said.

By 11:30 a.m., Rolph was treating Doran to lunch at Thrive’s HomeGrown restaurant at Bradley Fair, where the two discussed aviation, wine and dining. Rolph said talking about what happened was a little surreal, like it had happened to someone else.

He said his other luck that day was that the incident didn’t happen over Colorado — where the terrain is not as amenable to an emergency landing — and that he was alone.

“I didn’t have the burden of . . . other people’s lives,” Rolph said.

“My good luck just kept going.”

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©2020 The Wichita Eagle (Wichita, Kan.)

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