Nomen Nescio wrote:
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From: Dudley Henriques

I hate to second guess another pilot who was there and actually had the
accident, but depending on where he was when he lost the engine, my
initial question would be why he crashed at all having a 2000 foot grass
strip to land on. I'm puzzled. If he had any time at all to plan a dead
engine approach into such a strip, he should have made it in there with
no issues at all with a Bo.

Well, throwing another WAG into the mix..............
The guy may have been nervous about a 2000' grass strip and just
flown the approach as a poor short/soft field landing. I'm amazed, nowadays,
at the number of pilots who have never landed on a grass strip.
He may have tried waaaay to hard to put it down on the end of the strip...and
came up short.

As to "Ol Shy & Bashful"'s question "So, what do you do?".
I'd probably approach a bit high and a bit hot. Counting on a slip to square
things up in the last few seconds. Figuring that if I REALLY blew it, it's better
to go off the far end at 20 kts, than land short at 90 kts.

This, of course, assumes that the plane had enough energy to give the
pilot some options.

The thing about forced landings is that no two of them are exactly
alike. It's the total acceptance of this single fact that forms the
basis for the way all good instructors teach pilots to think about these
situations. In other words, what you could and should have done 5
seconds ago is now changed from that to what you should be doing NOW,
based on the extremely dynamic situation in play as an emergency takes
place involving a forced landing with an aircraft moving through threee
dimensional space.

In order to evaluate post incident what a pilot could have or should
have done in a given accident, one literally has to project the flight
path backwards from the impact scene to the point in space where the
emergency occurred; then data point from there two decision paths to the
impact point; the first path the decisions made vs the second decision
path; the decisions possible for the existing conditions.

(For example; 90 kts and short immediately presents the question; why short?

This is an extremely difficult process as one can see :-), and is the
reason why it's so hard to come to any viable conclusions in these
discussions.

Your general "plan" for a forced landing set up sounds good to me.


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Dudley Henriques