David Hill writes:

After getting my private, I was wondering about this, particularly
because the airport I usually fly out of (PDK) is surrounded by
development that leaves no place, at any time of day, to even dream of
setting down safely in the event of an engine failure.

Confirm this with someone who knows better, but from what I've heard,
you need only about 20 ft of deceleration to have a chance of
surviving a landing in a Cherokee/172/Musketeer-class aircraft. That
suggests that setting down in a developed area (an unoccupied part,
preferably) might be survivable.

To take a real-world example, an instructor taking a sightseeing
flight out of Buttonville (near Toronto) had an engine failure over
solid development, so she set the plane down deliberately in a grove
of small trees on the front lawn of the IBM plant. The trees smashed
up the plane nicely, but in doing so, they dissipated enough energy
that she and her passengers walked away. Here's the story (with
photo):

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968793972154

I read afterwards that she went back to work later that day.


All the best,


David