Another conservative option for 180 is “wingover”, 45 down, level, 45 up, roll 45 at 45, roll 90 at 90, roll back 45 at 135 and level at 180
Unlike, chandelles or other manoeuvres at least on this one you will know if you can make the 180 turn from the perception you get in the first 45 dive down, again I never try it on PA28
I flew it with someone who is “authorised” to do wing-overs/loops in gliders at 600 agl (my stop is 1500 agl), it is easy to forget how to fly it when the “human factor” comes in
See the ‘Why do people do stupid things?’ thread as to what happens when you get it wrong.
Good one.
(Sorry I did not mean for the persons involved!)
A chandelle in a narrow valley horrifies me. You’re assuming no turbulence, downdraft. Or have you never turned in a narrow valley?
I posted videos of turning in valleys somewhere on this site long ago.
A steep bank, descending, throttle closed, starting with a climb to reduce speed. Not the same as EFATO turn-back, as you should have time to choose the position.
But the valley floor does fill the windscreen.
Here is another video of the “impossible turn”
It is from 2009 so perhaps the pilot sat on the video for a bit before going public.
My observations would be that he did very well although I would have gone for the nice looking snow covered fields 
Also it is well established that the optimal turn is a steep one, around 45 degree bank angle, not the very slow one he did.
The other thing I observe, visible later in the video, is the appalling condition of everything in the engine compartment. Whoever was working on that plane wasn’t even capable of tying a cable tie anywhere near right. Admittedly this is seen in many GA planes observed in the workshop, and probably has no bearing on the cylinder splitting all the way round…
Just happened on this thread, thanks to Peter’s post.
I tried this a while back in my TR182. I pulled the power, counted to 2, then entered the turn. I started from 1000 feet and worked down to 500. At 800 and above I would have overshot the (short – 2500 feet or so) runway. At 500 it was a bit of sphincter-clincher but I easily made the runway – and that included lowering the gear, which is optional in this situation.
That was keeping my speed 10 knots higher than it needed to be (i.e. 1.2 * Vs + 10). I tried it at altitude using 1.2 Vs (stall speed in a 45 degree bank) and it could be done in 400 feet. In the process I discovered that my plane stalls very differently (and very benignly) in a 45 degree bank than it does when level. Level, there is no detectable buffet. At 45 degrees there is LOTS of it, but no real nose drop. I flew a 45 degree banked turn at 5 knots BELOW 1.2 Vs, with the plane shaking like crazy, and the altitude loss was no worse than at 5 knots ABOVE 1.2 Vs.
I don’t buy the 4 second thing, for one simple reason – there are quite a few people who have survived engine failure in an R22. There you have at most 2 seconds to get the collective down and enter autorotation, before the rotor stalls (and you die). (There are also, sadly, plenty of people who have indeed died).
All that said – I am very uncomfortable flying out of airports (like Reid-Hillview, KRHV, near here) where landing more or less straight ahead is not an option. By the time you get to 500 feet, where the impossible turn might be an option, you can generally find something within 45 degrees. It’s EFATO at <200 feet that gives you almost no good options in a lot of places.
Incidentally I posted my results on Pprune (it was a long while ago) and was practically accused of being personally responsible for killing pilots.
In a Bonanza, I could probably safely do it above 1200 feet, but it is not recommendable, except when the usual 30 degree arc right-left doesn’t provide viable options, i.e. in a densely built city area. It’s a risk-reward calculation in about 5 seconds…
This was one of the lucky pilots who survived it. Exercising it costs more lives than it may save.
I’ve witnessed the “Impossible turn” for real. I posted about it here at the time.
We were flying a Grumman Tiger, my wife was flying and I was in the right seat, we had a passenger in the back seat. We were leaving New Orleans Lakefront.
At roughly 400 feet (as recorded by GPS) the engine simply quit cold.
There was NO two second delay; my wife lowered the nose immediately. Coincidentally, around five seconds earlier, I was thinking ‘where do we go if it stops’, and looking for locations, because straight ahead was alligator infested water, which is not an optimum landing site for a Grumman Tiger. I had identified one off to the right; we started turning right immediately. However, we didn’t need it, we made it back to the runway, touching down almost exactly where we lifted off. A factor in this was that around halfway through the turn, the engine came to life again for approximately two seconds, which gave us some much welcome energy. Even without that, I’m quite confident we would have made it onto airfield property, just not a runway – but airfield property likely means an aircraft you can use again afterwards and no alligators.
We did not fly the ‘optimum’, we stayed well above stall speed (the stall warner beeped a couple of times, but in the Tiger it goes off a good ten knots before you stall), and we didn’t bank particularly hard – I can probably find our GPS track and calculate roughly what bank angle we used.
It would be interesting to know how the altitude loss changes with speed away from the optimum – if being 10 knots fast doesn’t amount to much more altitude lost, then chasing the optimum is likely to be a fool’s errand that’ll get people into trouble. A glider instructor once told me: if you have a sudden emergency you’re going to have a hit of adrenaline and as a consequence, fly like crap, so it’s better to be too fast than too slow.
It’s going to be different for different aircraft: the Tiger as an example glides a lot better than a Piper Arrow or a Bonanza.
@EDDSPeter did this for real and did it really well.
I also saw someone do it at Shoreham. Well, I almost saw it. It was so fast that I barely had time to realise what happened. I was #2 on departure and suddenly somebody landed in the opposite direction
Having landed with 10kts tailwind in short grass once by mistake, I still think if the engine quits landing ahead in the wide farm nearby into wind will have more chances of walking away than trying to fly back to that 500m grass with trees after an EFATO…
If the runway is 5km, you can depart from the middle land ahead on remaining 2km from 500ft with 10kts headwind or turn back and land with 10kts tailwind on 3km behind
At the end of the day (runway) size matters !
