Hi Beagle,
I would struggle to think of a PEFATO as a high risk exercise. From memory (of having messed up one in particular) you had to ‘get on with it’, sort your energy out and then make a couple of judgement calls as to where you were going to intercept the pattern, where to take gear and flap and when to curtail the exercise. I found all the emergency landings in a Hawk to be good exercises in the sense that they were a good work out, a useful handling exercise and allowed me to work on my airmanship. I never considered them to be high risk, but then my personal disposition was to chuck away an approach before attempting aggressive handling to rescue it. Just me but I was genuinely surprised to read the findings of the SI report.