You can’t get a clearance into class A airspace under VFR, and SVFR is only available in a CTR (controlled airspace that goes to the surface).
Crossing water is one of those things that is just down to personal perceptions of risk. Plenty of people who worry about crossing the channel in their SEP never take recurrent training – somehow feeling that ditching in the channel due to random mechanical failure is more likely to be the accident scenario they face rather than running out of skill while flying.
Jan_Olieslagers wrote:
Because, as I understood, above FL065 is class A which requires IFR which neither poor little me nor poor little my plane are certified for.
But in that case, you couldn’t get a block altitude either!
I don’t know what you mean by a “block altitude”. What I am hoping for (realising the hope is very very faint) is the owner of the airspace making it class C or D instead of class A up to FL080. Perhaps I caused confusion by mentioning a “block” of airspace – a “chunk” might be a better term.
I’ve never heard of someone being allocated a “block” of anything in Europe. That is a US term.
Under IFR, what you can do is negotiate with London Control for a given route, which gives you the least amount of water. They are normally very helpful, but I have not tried this myself so I don’t know at what level you would get it. That bit of the UK (DVR) is full of airliners climbing and descending. Most of them are c. FL200 but not all.
Under VFR you have to stay below the Class A so unless you are flying a motor glider you will be outside glide range of land for a little bit.
It is true that there are also time windows over land where an engine failure would put you in a difficult position but those time windows tend to be a lot shorter. They tend to be built-up areas around airports. Stats show that very few planes crash in these situations, but loads of planes end up in the sea.
OTOH the significant number of ditchings could be inflated by running out of fuel. Quite a lot of people have ditched on the UK to Jersey/Guernsey run – because they want the cheap fuel so depart with not much in the tanks. And since most people don’t have a fuel totaliser, a departure with some level of minimal fuel means departing with the level below the visually inspectable level. Search EuroGA for G-OMAR for a famous case of operating down there…
The other land case is forests and mountains but again it seems the time windows are not as big as one might think. The Alps are full of landing sites – if you are not above an overcast 
JasonC wrote:
Crossing water is one of those things that is just down to personal perceptions of risk. Plenty of people who worry about crossing the channel in their SEP never take recurrent training – somehow feeling that ditching in the channel due to random mechanical failure is more likely to be the accident scenario they face rather than running out of skill while flying.
+1
We’ve just come back from a trip flying Stornoway – Faroes – Iceland – Faroes – Bergen in our SEP. The total was something like 8 hours out of gliding range over water.
We were wearing immersion suits and life jackets, each carrying flares and dye marker and individual PLBs. On the back seat we had a life raft. A lot of thought went in to egress strategies, briefing ditching technique, carrying the life raft on the passenger’s lap when below 2000ft above the water.
In the end, I felt just as nervous flying over the mountains in Iceland and Norway as I did over the sea – at least on the sea the chances of making a successful landing are reasonably high, even if the aftermath is quite tricky.
The level of [perceived] risk was something we were OK with. This is a combination of relatively relaxed risk perception, a lot of risk compensation, and tolerating a relatively high level of risk.
Risk tolerance is a very personal thing, and I wouldn’t presume to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t tolerate!
Risk perception is an area that is very prone to influence by “human factors” (in both directions), and is something we all need to think about carefully .
Risk compensation is something we should all actively think about, and something I believe we can be quite objective about.
I fly the channel a couple of times a month. At any kind of reasonable speed and height, the time out of gliding range is very short. My perceived risk here is very low. Because it’s something I do so regularly, my acceptable risk is relatively low. My risk compensation is to fly at a reasonable height and wear a life jacket and PLB.
Just to be a bit playful on this topic, but I hope I put my point across… if there is a perceived risk that the engine will quit when crossing the Channel, in an environment where the risk window is open for a few seconds at the critical point, then how do you also address and mitigate the risk that the engine quits on take off when you have not enough runway left to land ahead, not enough height to attempt a turn, and therefore are going into the hedge/fence/wall/valley/dip/forest at the end of the runway…
I believe, if we really stop and think things through there are far worse risks than a few miles over water, that we face every time we fly, but we know them, feel comfortable with them, and probably subconsciously mitigate them.
I believe there’s a saying, that you rather get overrun by a ship in the channel than being drowned 
I agree, that there are more risky scenarios than flying over water a few minutes with life jackets especially over the channel, especially in summer….
On the subject of sinking aeroplanes, it can be interesting to do a rough buoyancy calculation. Before allowing for buoyancy of any baggage, and with two good hours of fuel in the tanks, my Maule has a net buoyancy of about 100 kg. I might expect some of those funny wooden Froggie airplanes to float too, and probably a Cirrus (which seems basically like a Maule with wing in different place and better TV screens).
