Crossing banks of low cloud VFR over the top in Oregon earlier this year I followed highways shown on Foreflight. Reasoning was that the highway likely followed lower terrain, was more likely to be in VMC, might provide a suitable landing site and if not might allow others to witness the crash. It would be achievable to descend through the overcast and still end up within a few hundred feet of the highway, hopefully clear of the surrounding forest.
One of the areas that synthetic vision would be a fairly big help…
With an engine failure in IMC I would:
- fly a heading into the wind.
- Trim for best glide
- Use ATC and/or a Moving Map to find an unpopulated area.
- Switch on Terrain on the G1000 MFD
- When approaching ground I would fly as slow as possible and try to avoid obstacles.
Think I would try to reach an airport only if I know I can make it.
Airports are usually surrounded by obstacles…
I would trim for minimum sink rather than best glide.
This is one of the cases where CAPS/BRS shines if you don’t have a second engine …
Search for Roads or River/Lake and the last 2.000ft AGL I would drop out at fast as possibel. With 150KIAS I can fly to a spot, with 80KIAS I only drop in the Ground :-)
Lacking CAPS and a second engine, how’s about avoiding powered approaches? Seems to me a better recipe to avoid this kind of disaster.
Not many IFR approaches can be flown power-off :-)
And doesn’t 2015 technology allow for the creation of some that can?
If so, why isn’t it happening?
Wasn’t all this bunch of electronics supposed to increase safety?
Jan_Olieslagers wrote:
Lacking CAPS and a second engine, how’s about avoiding powered approaches? Seems to me a better recipe to avoid this kind of disaster.
Here we go again… ;-)
How would power-off approaches help if the engine fails before starting the approach? The time you spend on the approach is very small compared to the time you spend enroute. Why should you sacrifice the added stability and precision you can get with a power-on approach for a completely marginal reduction in engine failure risk.
