A Short Hop in the Viking

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But we’re not out of the woods yet. Now the right engine refuses to light off. It reaches the recommended RPM to introduce fuel (throttle to idle) but never lights off and the RPM stagnates at around 35%. We’ve just had a wet start. The pilot and COTAC get out their PCL (pilot check list) and read off the procedures for handling a wet start, which involve cranking the engine for a short period of time in order to blow any unburned fuel out of the engine where it might have pooled.

With the right engine cooled down, we attempt to restart it. Suddenly the plane captain is frantically giving us the “engine fire” hand signal and backing away from the jet rapidly. That’s usually a bad sign, but we have no fire indications in the cockpit. Well, it’s not unusual for a little unburned fuel to be pooled in the tailpipe area after a wet start, and that fuel burns as a thin streamer of flame and a lot of white smoke when you restart the engine. Apparently the plane captain wasn’t familiar with this, and got a little overexcited. Whatever the case, our pilot complied with the immediate action emergency procedures for an engine fire on deck, despite being fairly certain that the “fire” signal from the PC was in error. The squadron’s flight deck coordinator, typically a seasoned old chief petty officer with years of flight deck maintenance experience, came over and inspected our right engine, giving us the thumb’s up that all was well. We restarted the engine one more time, and got a good light off, with stable idle rpm. We were good to go, and once we get our systems on line the Yellow Shirt breaks us down (has our chocks and chains removed) and we taxi to the catapults for launch.

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