Robin_253 wrote:
A very dense forest would be safer to crash-land on then many other places.
In the current issue of the Europa Magazine about EFATO it’s stated, that landing in trees has been found to have a mortality of around 10%. I think that’s really not that bad as one might think.
That makes sense. Survivability comes from decelerating over as many metres as possible. I remember a thread where someone calculated the survivability boundary at around 10 metres for their aircraft (depends on mass and stall speed).
Robin_253 wrote:
A very dense forest would be safer to crash-land on then many other places. There are techniques to minimise risks of such landing, so again one can do it.What are the techniques? I’ve learned that forests are really not good places to go and in Sweden with lots and lots of forests but a reasonable amount of lakes, I would go for a lake.
I happen to know of several relevant incidents, read many accident reports, and would be astonished if a forest was a good idea for a forced landing.
It is “ok” if the hull ends up nicely between trees (so it might work if you land in a “sustainable” plantation and if you land on the correct heading, and the surface wind also happened to be blowing on that heading, and if the forest pattern was evident from above the canopy 
) because the wings might be “neatly” ripped off and result in a useful deceleration, and hopefully the fuel gets spilt (and probably ignited) some distance behind the point where the hull comes to a stop.
But this is rare. Most forest landings totally wreck the plane and most occupants get severe injuries at least. The problem with fatal stats is that they conceal the life-changing injuries… such as reportedly in e.g. the last UK SR22 one where the hull was mostly intact.
I would go for a lake, every time, in such a case. I carry a raft, after all. Same with the Alps although actually the Alps have loads of canyons and at say FL150 you have at least a 90% chance of gliding into a nice flat bottomed one with fields. That is really obvious when overflying the Alps in VMC. I also run a GPS topo map showing the canyons etc (a specially produced ~5GB Oziexplorer database from google terrain, before google blocked bulk downloads ). Not so for the Pyrenees; they have mostly no options at all – just spikes of rock everywhere.
I would think to take
- a field with low crops (gear down) or sheep
- a field with high crops (gear up) or cattle
- a lake
- a forest
In that order. Would that make sense? 2 and 3 may differ but even with a low wind retractable and a raft, a water exit and recovery is risky.
This one is fresh:
September 2017, somewhere on the polish-ukrainian border. No traces of blood, no bodies inside, nobody claimed the airplane. Most probably guys flew low at night to avoid detection. Possibly carrying cigarets or some other highly taxed goods to EU. For whatever reason they had to land there and then, and they did. All they had was a moon light because this is a very remote place with little civilisation. Chapeau bas.
Peter wrote:
would be astonished if a forest was a good idea for a forced landing
Is Hudson River a good idea for a forced landing?
Sure it isn’t, but sometimes you have no other alternatives.
Peter wrote:
Most forest landings totally wreck the plane and most occupants get severe injuries at least.
Do you have any statistics at hand to support this opinion?
AdamFrisch wrote:
Anyone who’s flown around their family or loved ones in a plane that had an engine failure they survived will not return to a single.
I’ve had that happen in a single and I still fly with family in a single.
Admittedly my fiancee was PIC at the time and the person in the back was a regular non-pilot flyer.
It was also one of those situations which would have been equally, if not more hazardous, in a typical light twin we could afford to operate. Leaving New Orleans Lakefront, at 350 feet, the engine quit cold. We had taken the full length of the long runway so we were at about the airfield boundary when this happened. It was either ditch or go for a vacant green area off to our right, we began turning that way and with the nose lowered to maintain airspeed, the engine caught again for a few seconds enabling us to maintain enough altitude to actually keep on going and return to the runway (the engine surged into life and quit again a couple of times, and then continued to run once we had landed).
The important thing here is the aircraft had the same flight characteristics as it always had, all the way though the short flight. Even if we had to ditch in the lake, the aircraft’s flight characteristics would have remained the same all the way to the wet and unpleasant – but perfectly survivable (and most likely survivable without injury) arrival.
The surging engine in a light twin would have lead to an aircraft that was difficult to control directionally as it would have gone from producing takeoff power to producing a tremendous amount of drag repeatedly, resulting in severe yaw oscillations (and as a consequence, roll as well), at 350 feet, although at least the gear would have been fully retracted at this stage. This would have made it harder to determine the correct engine to shut down as it’s no longer a matter of “dead foot dead engine”, you now have to examine the engine gauges and interpret them – which while not rocket science, does add to the time taken and workload, while in a suddenly stressful situation with an aircraft which now has terrible flying qualities thanks to an engine that keeps quitting and restarting. At this point it becomes much easier to mishandle the aircraft, which is likely to result in a high energy out of control impact which kills everyone on board.
Now I’m not saying “twins are deathtraps and I’ll never fly one”, I rather enjoyed flying a light twin, but I’m also realistic that in any twin that we could possibly afford, it’s not likely to be safer than a single.
Peter wrote:
It is “ok” if the hull ends up nicely between trees (so it might work if you land in a “sustainable” plantation and if you land on the correct heading,
It just went in the forest where it went, no nicely between the trees – straight into the treetops then down to the ground. Only the pilot sustained injuries, IIRC.
denopa wrote:
but even with a low wind retractable and a raft, a water exit and recovery is risky.
Any forced landing except in a nice flat field is risky.
The Pawnee ditching video from a couple of weeks back demonstrated:
I also know someone who ditched a Twin Comanche in the Irish Sea (and it wasn’t due to running out of fuel, the AAIB still found fuel in the tanks after it had been at the bottom of the sea for 3 months). The pilot was uninjured, despite the relatively high touchdown speed of a light twin.
Do you have any statistics at hand to support this opinion?
I can post some wreckage pics but some would not appreciate them 
Peter wrote:
I can post some wreckage pics
Then, it’s just a (biased) opinion, like Rotax is more reliable then Lycoming and I believe there is no need to spread fear in the community.
Can’t say for high performance aircraft like Pa-46 but any C172, C182 or Jodel and it’s derivatives can be safely landed off airfield. Safe out-landing in high mountains requires preparations. One needs to know in advance where landable spots are and preferably have them stored in some kind of GPS. When flying over Alps I personally took a car to drive to the most important and most difficult ones. Time spent on walking across the field looking for possible obstacles on approach from all possible directions is invaluable. Additional benefit is that once you know what is there and your altitude is critically low you can execute a straight in approach.
