In any case if you are a low or lowish hour PPL and you are sitting in a bent airplane, it probably won't be because the engine failed it will be the result of miss handling during landing or takeoff. Before obsessing about the engine suddenly blowing up and you having to do a forced approach, my advice if you want something to practice, is to start really working at making every landing a nice tail low, on centerline touchdown in the first quarter of the runway.........
This is a very good piece of advice!
Genghis
I think care needs to be taken when extrapolating experience with 2 stoke engines, homebuilts with auto engine conversions and experimental engine installations , which are much more prone to failure, to what is the case for certified airplanes with nonturbocharged Lycomings or Continentals.
Sudden unforeseeable total failures of these engines are very rare. The reality is the GA pilot community needs to do a better job at not making the basic kinds of mistakes which causes the engine to fail. There was a write up in the accident summary page in PIlot a few months ago. A PA28 was completed a forced landing in difficult circumstances with no injuries but major aircraft damage. When interviewed the pilot said he attributed his successful forced landing due to the fact that he regularly practiced forced landings.
However the reason the engine failed is because he let carb ice develop to such an extent the engine stopped. It would seem to me if he had spent a little less time on PFL's and a little more time on understanding carb ice, how it develops and its symptoms along with practicing the cockpit discipline to regularly check for ice, he would not have needed that forced landing skill and there would be one less wrecked PA 28 in the UK..........
Maoraigh.
I said flat not level. What I was getting at was a field that did not have big humps, ditches etc. Flat is good, level is even better but uphill or mildly downhill is fine. My point is better is the enemy of good enough when it comes to field selection. Better to make a quick decision on the close "good enough" field and then concentrate on flying to the touchdown point then waffle about trying to decide which of the 4 choices is the "best" or try to stretch the glide to get to the perfect field.
My point about pushing down the nose to force the aircraft onto the ground at the chosen touchdown point is for the case where the aircraft is high and fast. Better to smash it on in the middle of the field then to float along in ground effect trying for that perfect tail low, low speed touchdown and instead hit the stone wall at the edge of the field at flying speed.
I think flying training feeds the "hero pilot" myth about how one is a great pilot if they fly a great forced approach manoever. Unsexy but far more likely to reduce the number of real forced approaches would be much more emphasis on the basics of fuel management, understanding what the engine gauges are telling you and promptly and effectively dealing with carb ice.
In any case if you are a low or lowish hour PPL and you are sitting in a bent airplane, it probably won't be because the engine failed it will be the result of miss handling during landing or takeoff. Before obsessing about the engine suddenly blowing up and you having to do a forced approach, my advice if you want something to practice, is to start really working at making every landing a nice tail low, on centerline touchdown in the first quarter of the runway.........
I guess until EASA comes into force the rules in NL are different from the UK. But we have areas that are notified as low-flying areas, and some of these are not exclusively for the military.
In most of these areas we can legally go down to 100 feet.
I agree with BPF except for two points. Why flat? What's wrong with uphill. And pushing the nose down to spot land will leave a lot of energy to dissipate. Practice touching down on the stall - and consider bushes etc. (I've never had an engine failure except on take-off with enough runway to stop, but I have had several engine problems which were solved by carb heat/electric pump on/change tank/mixture.) PS I have hit a fence.
I'm going to add my opinion right in between Genghis and BPF. Certainly regular PFL practice is an excellent thing to do, and preserving airframes is nice to do when you can do it with no personal risk. However, traffic considered, this can generally be practiced on runways, and to the ground there. If an instructor comes to have a "favourite spot" which is otherwise harmless, that they can surprise a student into for a low n over that's great, but otherwise, I think that your average rental pilot, who is out diligently practicing PFL's solo, is best to plan to initiate a go around at 500 feet AGL. That allows that pilot time to adjust the plan if it quits then, or something else unexpected happens. It also prevents surprises like unseen wires, or a remarkably poor departure path from spoiling the flight.
During instruction, the decision making for selecting off airport landing sites can be made quite nicely from 500 feet, and really, in powered cruise flight. Aside from unseen wires, a seemingly good choice made from 500 feet will still be an adequately good choice during an actual emergency.
It's not often that I disagree with BPF, but I do.
I currently own the third of a series of low-value good-fun aeroplanes, which I carry third party and passenger liability insurance on. If the engine stops, I still own the aeroplane - the insurers only injure anything else I break. Probably because of a love of 2-stroke Rotax engined aeroplanes, or that and that I test fly homebuilts, I've had a few engine failures, and every one I've not put a scratch on the aeroplane. I attribute this in large part to proper and regular practice - to the start of the roundout followed by a go-around, not deluding myself that I have a full picture into what may be a tiny 200m field from 500ft. I really don't believe that that is true.
Incidentally I'm not sure what value you used for g BPF, but I make a 60-->0 9g decel as taking 18 feet in about 0.35s.
And having said all that, if your average PPL actually practiced PFLs with any regularity at-all, say every 3 months, then I'd feel far more comfortable about their ability to handle a real engine failure, regardless of what height they go around from. The reality is that most PPLs don't practice a PFL from one BFR to the next, and since in the UK a PFL is not a mandatory part of a BFR, many are probably managing 5+ years without every practicing one. That is really really a recipe for a problem should they ever get an engine failure.
G
In the light of this, I wondered what peoples experiences are on choosing a go-around altitude when practising forced landings over the UK countryside? I'd sure like to go lower than 500ft without actually landing, but concerned about litigious farmers . . .
Going back to the original question, it referred to Rule 5 which of course only gives exemptions to practicing approaches at Government or Licensed aerodromes. In the open countryside you are still subject to Rule 5 until it is replaced by SERA. So long as you do not get within 500 feet of any person,vehicle, vessel, structure etc you can go as low as you like. For there to be a successful prosecution under Rule 5 there has to be two independent witnesses!
So long as you do not abuse Rule 5, the ability to come down to a realistic height on a PFL is a valuable opportunity to assess whether you will get in or not. At 500 feet you will not have started to select flap to bring the aiming point towards you, so much of the judgement is not learned.
SERA takes away that opportunity and leaves us with an absolute legal minima of 500 ft agl.
When I was doing my PPL we did a PFL in a C 150 to about 200 feet AGL on a hot summer day. Unfortunately the flaps refused to move from the 40 deg position on the overshoot. The airplane would barely maintain altitude at full power and there was a very tense 10 min flight getting home at very low level. 500 feet is plenty low enough and will definitively prove whether you will make the field.
However on the broader subject of forced landings I think it is important to remember that at least 80 % of real engine failures are caused by the actions or inactions of the pilot with fuel exhaustion/mismanagement and carb icing leading the hit parade. The best way to deal with the forced approach scenario is to not cause the engine to fail in the first place, and if it does fail to get it going again by means of a quick and comprehensive cause check.
The flight school PFL scenario of a sudden unexpected total loss of power is in fact the absolute least likely scenario to actually happen to a pilot. There is almost always some clues that the engine is going to quit and if you do have engine trouble the most likely result will be a partial loss of power not sudden silence.
As for dealing with an actual failure there are some important factors which should be considered.
The instant the engine fails the insurance company just took delivery of the airplane. What it looks like after it comes to a stop is of no importance as long as nobody is hurt and therefore the condition of the landing surface is of no importance as long as it is reasonably flat with no obstacles.
The killer accidents are those where the aircraft hits something at flying speed and/or in a steep nose down and/or banked attitude. The key to surviving the forced approach is to select a field that has clear approaches and is close in order to give you the greatest chance of arriving at your touchdown point level and under control.
A 60 kts to 0 knots 9 Gee deacceleration takes about 25 feet. The key to survival is to have the aircraft have some distance to deaccelerate. Hitting the immovable object at speed is how people get killed. But you don't need thousands of feet just something you can make that is flat and at least a few hundred feet long.
it is always better to be high then low on the approach. If you are too high and fast point the aircraft at your chosen touchdown point and smash the aircraft on to the ground when you get to it.
An organisation I started training with once spent a lot of time doing PFLs around a particular farm. A policeman was sat in the RHS with a camera. They eventually got enough evidence, and went and removed a great deal of recreational narcotic, as well as a number of people involved in producing same.
Not sure whether PC plod paid much for this, but it was a great bit of work.
G
N.B. I suspect that the ladies under discussion may have been poorly placed to write down registrations?
Indeed ;-) All I was advised is that the ladies were enjoying the company of each other very intimately and probably due to their embarrassment (or perhaps their need not to have their field of choice made public) the instructor never received a noise or otherwise low flying complaint :-) I wonder if he remembers where exactly that field is and whether he went out later to do another, ahem, PFL ....
