AZ,azflyer wrote: ↑Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:43 amI don't agree with this. Please see my detailed flight plan right up in the post above this. Here is the link to the flight plan I believe they would have followed in skyvector.If you map the flight path, they would have been at least 20 miles south of Delta at the time of the engine roughness / failure.
https://skyvector.com/?ll=39.0049561439 ... DTA%20KSGU
Delta VOR is not halfway in miles, but it is the last main marker, and it is, in my opinion, the most likely place to make the 1/2 way announcement. Also, if they were 20 miles south of Delta VOR, they probably would have landed at Fillmore. That would have been the closer airport.
Redraw the map with only DTA as a waypoint. The flight path is now virtually a straight line from SLC to SGU, meaning they'd have flown over DTA en route.
Now, you'll see that SLC > DTA is 92 nautical miles and DTA > SGU is 144 nautical miles. Take the difference of 52 nautical miles, divide by 2, and add the resulting 26 nautical miles to the SLC > DTA path and you'll see that the half-way point, or "point of no return" per Nelson's "vivid" memory, is roughly 26 miles south-southwest of Delta airport.
In other words, the pilot's halfway announcement will have been ~26 miles (I said ~20 miles above, but your map is more precise than the Google map I used). Even if the engine failed immediately at half-way and the plane turned 180 degrees around instantly, there would have been 26 miles to slow and descent. At full cruising speed this is ~15 minutes of flying. It may have been a few minutes after half-way, and each minute must be doubled because they flew and had to backtrack for each of those minutes. Anyway, all of this is to say that there was at least 10 minutes and probably more like 15-20 minutes of controlled descent flying before landing at DTA.