It took more than 2 minutes for my engine to quit after selecting OFF on my fuel selector with the engine at idle.
Many years ago, I was waiting for launch in a Glasflugel H-201 Libelle glider at Waikerie in South Australia while the tow plane was taxiing over to me from the fuel filler.
He sat idling in front of me while I finished my pre-launch checks and accepted the tow rope from the ground crew, then he lined up, tensioned the tow-rope slack, and firewalled the throttle to take off.
Bouncing down the grass runway behind him, I was just starting to get "light" on the main wheel when the tug
stopped. It was like he'd applied a hand brake or something.
At the other end of the rope 150 feet behind him, yanking at the tow release knob, I had a fraction of a second to slam full right aileron to jam the wingtip onto the ground to try to turn away from him. There was no way I'd have time to stop; even if the wheel brake was up to the task, there wasn't enough weight on the wheel for it to work anyway.
I ended up rolling to a halt about fifty feet past him, maybe thirty feet off to one side. Replaying it in my mind 15 years later, I feel like I can recall every detail of the interval between tow plane power loss and overtaking it three seconds later.
Near miss. If I'd run into the back of the tow plane at flying speed I'd have written-off two aircraft and my legs.
DR's forum software will *'s any attempts I'd make to describe what I said afterwards. I'm from a culture that uses the C word as a term of endearment, we can say things that'd make half a platoon of Marines all blush at the same time while the other half are standing up to defend their mothers
You can probably guess about how unimpressed I was.
Anyway: The reason the tug stopped was fuel starvation. The tow pilot had turned off the fuel selector during refueling for some reason, and forgotten to turn it back on again afterwards.
There was enough fuel in the float bowl and the lines for this Piper Pawnee to taxi to my position, idle for long enough for me to get hooked on, and run at full power for long enough for my glider to be starting to leave the ground before the engine stopped,
all with no fuel supply at all.
(satellite view:
https://goo.gl/maps/hz7PcwyQbMhHyxye9 Refueling is near the SE corner of the big hangar on the western side of the ramp; The glider launch point is the lightish green grass strip just past the kink in the southbound taxiway)
I have no trouble believing that a mis-plumbed O-360 with a restrictor in the fuel line could perform a full high-power run-up without a hiccup. If these engines didn't accept a lot of slack in the system, they'd fail a lot more often. Marginal fuel supply doesn't make them stop, they'll keep running until it runs out completely.
- mark