Some years ago I flew, for a business meeting. to a strip in south west UK, which shall remain nameless 
The owner described it as “1200m and quite smooth”.
I happened to fly that way a couple of weeks earlier so went to the location (it is actually marked on the CAA 1:500k map, which I have running as a GPS moving map) and it looked OK… quite a bit longer than most strips and indeed 1200 is way longer than the usual.
Upon touchdown, I thought “this is rough as hell” but managed to taxi to the parking spot, where another plane was parked. It took a lot of power but grass usually does.
When departing, things got quite interesting. I thought my teeth were going to fall out. I managed to get the nosewheel off (the “soft field departure” method) but it took about 1000m to get airborne. For comparison, the tarmac ground run is about 300m and 500m tarmac is fine at MTOW and a few k elevation (Switzerland).
Upon landing at my base, the plane turned out to be completely covered with green sh*t. It turned out that the grass was, in places, over 20cm long and the prop chopped it up into nice little pieces. It wouldn’t come off and I had to pay a commercial outfit £200 to get it off with some special cleaner. And get it off the landing gear, too.
The lesson? Check before flying to a grass field.
But how? The owner/operator is hardly going to say “it is crap, full of molehills and potholes and the grass is long enough to reach the prop”.
For this reason I tend to avoid grass because over years it does translate to more maintenance work. But I wonder how this is solved for all the people who fly mostly or exclusively between grass strips.
As a bit of a small time grassland farmer I would expect to have noticed it on landing, and certainly taxiing in.
I have in the past walked grass strips end to end before departure, at times it is the only way to be sure you have identified any suspect areas of ground.
The problems are rarely potholes, but I have flown into a strip with a track running across them, with corresponding ruts. Soft ground or long grass are the two other common problems.
I usually talk to a based pilot for an informed opinion.
I have in the past walked grass strips end to end before departure, at times it is the only way to be sure you have identified any suspect areas of ground.
I quite often go to grass airfields to fly / test locally based aeroplanes.
I’ve regarded that end-to-end walk as absolutely essential for quite a few years now. Not just the surface, but the slope, grass length, convenient landmarks and aiming points fall out of that walk.
G
I think I’d want to walk the field too, or get a very trustworthy pilot report. I fly to a local (government ‘maintained’) gravel/dirt airport a few times each winter and the first time every season tends to be in somebody else’s plane… which I guess is another solution!
The only infrequently used grass field I’ve ever flown from is a polo field… Apparently horses don’t like to stub their toes when running around so no problem 
Well, this is kinda my turf (pun intended). If you have to land on an unknown runway, there are some tricks, but they are dependent upon skillful aircraft handling. I will drag the runway, with one wheel only if conditions permit, in an aborted soft field landing. I’ll bring the aircraft into contact with the runway, but keep most of the weight off the wheels. Best to run the runway as much length as possible. If you can manage it with only one wheel (crosswind helps with this), you’ll feel the wheel drag if the grass is long. If you feel enough drag that you need control to keep it straight, a full landing is probably not a good idea. Now, you’re already in the go around, so keep going, and look for another place to land.
If the aircraft type or conditions are not conducive to a one wheel landing, the other way is to deliberately bounce the mains onto the surface and back up, feeling the drag as they touch. You’ll have to judge the amount of the drag by the pitch change of the aircraft as the mains touch. Keep the nosewheel off while doing this. Again, you’ve planned an overshoot anyway, so stick with your plan, and go around, even if you like the feel of the surface. This is not the time to be changing your mind to land and stop, as the runway slipped behind you. A soft field landing is not a short field landing, so you’ve let lots of runway pass behind as you skillfully felt for the runway.
This technique is also rather wise if you have to land into unbroken snow, or onto a suspect surface like sand or possible mud. When you need to do this, you are probably remote, and a long way from help, so get it right! I’ll select my landing zone, and run it the full length multiple times, until I’m satisfied. I’ll then land short, and stop on my tracks, with the intention that I have a suitably long runway marked ahead of me. The short landing is very wise, but only because you have figured out the surface. A landing on a short and unknown surface is very high risk.
This running of the potential runway is also wise from a winds standpoint. As you touch, run and go, you’ll also assess the winds, so you know what to expect when you land fully.
I nomaly fly to and from grass fields so this kind of question is very relevant to me, but fortunatly there is generaly a pilot or two fairly conversant with the state of the runway at the destination field that I can contact. I guess that I have been lucky with the strip owners when I contact them from PPR, as I have always had a fair apraisal of the condition of the strip ranging from advice to avoid the bottom 50m of the slope as it is waterlogged to, " try not to use 09-27 there have been horses on it, it’ll rattle your teeth out". That coupled with the observation that longer grass normaly shows a darker colour and matchs the surrounding grasses while cut grass looks lighter have served me well and a low pass, if habitation allows, will show things like rabbit scrapes. An overhead join gives the chance to look for sources of rotor and turbulance and lookout for livestock and the like.
I like Pilot DAR’s observations, they remind me of guidance I received about landing on beaches
I do think PilotDAR is an awesomely skilled pilot, however
Nowadays I walk the taxi area before departing. It’s funny (or not) what one finds. Potholes, rocks, even just dips in the surface. Obviously one can’t do this prior to a landing
But what one can do post-landing is to take a very hard line on what sort of taxi surface looks acceptable – even if there are people taxiing behind you who are usually being billed on a brakes-off to brakes-on basis…
The grass worst surface I have ever seen at a “normal” airport was the grass parking at Friedrichshafen. I have 20cm of ground clearance but having had a pothole prop strike in 2002 (£20k) there was no way I was going to taxi on that “surface”. Luckily there were 3 of us to push, which we were easily able to. 2 people would not have moved it (~1100kg empty but with full fuel). The grass parking at La Rochelle was full of rocks too.
The owner described it as “1200m and quite smooth”.
“Quite smooth” is relative. Quite smooth for our Auster with fat tyres is a level but unprepared cow pasture. Quite smooth to a Mooney owner is nothing short of a golf putting green…
or onto a suspect surface like sand or possible mud.
I saw the result of someone not doing that on a suspect surface. Where I used to live (basically just off Galveston Bay in Texas) there’s an area where they dump the dregings (basically, they have to dig a subaquatic “canal” at the bottom of Galveston Bay so the big ships can make it to all the oil terminals in the Houston area). This area is adjoined to Galveston Island itself. From the air it looks just like a firm, smooth dried lake bed – the surface is even cracked as if it were totally dried out. A lack of rain during the summer can enhance this feeling.
But it’s not as this one Piper Cub owner discovered extremely suddenly and expensively. I was flying over it one afternoon and looked down, and there was a Piper Cub with its nose stuck firmly in the mud and tail in the air. The cracked surface is in fact extremely soft and won’t even support the weight of a person, and is probably at least six feet deep. You could see the wheel tracks where he touched down, and then about one plane length beyond that, the unfortunate Cub and a lot of churned up mud where he had exited the plane and had to wait for a helicopter to come and pull him out, since he was about quarter of a mile from the edge and there was just no way he was going to wade that far especially when it’s 35 deg. C out. (He could have probably slithered along the surface if he had thought about it, but I doubt there was much thinking about anything that day from that particular pilot…)
A tracked vehicle went out a few days later and recovered the aircraft.
I recall something similar. An aquaintaince although having been warned of the recommended procedure decided that the sand surface off the North Norfolk coast looked fine after a low pass and tried it. Sure enough he found a soft patch near the end of his landing run and slewed to a halt with undercarriage and possible airframe damage. He and his machine were resuced the the little tracked vehicle belonging to the RNLI and used for positioning the local lifeboat. Unfortunatly a gully between them and shore was filling with the rising tide and the aircraft was towed though the water on the way to the shore causing etensive and expensive damage.
Beach landings can be fun, but they demand a high level of care, forethought and after care
