Vacuum Failure

[TX-EcoDragon]

On my flight up to McMinnville I had a vacuum failure.  The vacuum is an engine driven pump system that creates a vacuum within the Attitude Indicator (Artificial horizon), and the directional gyro (Heading indicator) which provides airflow over the vanes of the gyros inside the instrument cases, and is responsible for keeping the gyros spinning. In IFR conditions a Vac failure is bad news, for obvious reasons . . . you still have a magnetic compass, altimeter, turn coordinator, and airspeed indicator which can be used for attitude control but it takes real skill and practice flying in the clouds like this, especially if it's bumpy.

So anyway. . .

I was flying along just South of Lake Shasta at 8,500 feet just minding my own business:



Taking in the scenery (and contemplating where I'd land in the event of an engine failure):




While scanning the panel I see the suction gauge showing a 0 value! At first the gyros act as if everything is fine, but slowly they begin to tumble:


 
A few moments later the attitude indicator really starts to roll. . . I mean really:



It was a blur!





S!

TX-EcoDragon
Black 1
TX-Squadron XO

[LW_Tornado]

Looks trippy at best , glad youre the "Emu" had it been a rookie or cloudy as hell would have been a different flight i bet , and BEAUTY of a shot at the mountain bro !!!S~ T

[TX-Kingsnake]

What did you do without the compas? Did you use the am tracking signal to land in Redding or did you triangulate home? Did you have a chance to hit print screen?TX-Kingsnake

[TX-EcoDragon]

well. . the magnetic compass works fine with a vacuum failure. . . the problem with the compass, and why it's not used all that much in most modern aircraft is because it has a lot of errors in anything other than level unaccellerated flight. That is why we use a gyro driven heading indicator that must be set to agree with the mag compass at about 15 minute intervals. That, along with the attitude indicator is what I lost when the vac bit the big one. I didn't need them for fair weather flying, but it was kinda strange flying around with them moving around in nonsensical patterns and trying to ignore them.S!TX-EcoDragonBlack 1TX-Squadron XO