Originally Posted by
old,not bold
I'
The Auster incident is relevant to the Impossible Turn. The club had a rule that before a first solo, the CFI would take the student on a check flight, usually a couple of circuits. On my check ride, at about 300ft the engine stopped suddenly. As I pushed the nose down to land ahead among some trees there was a shout of "I have control" and Les executed a diving turn to port, levelled off and landed downwind on the grass. He was an ex-RAF fighter pilot, Spitfire and Hurricane, I believe. The chances of surviving the procedure in the book, ie landing in the trees, were about 50/50.
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The actual accident record for forced landings in trees is almost 100 % survivability if the airplane was under control. The fatal accidents where the airplane hit trees are when the aircraft was not in controlled flight. The low altitude turnback is almost binary. You either make it or you lose control in the turn and the resultant stall spin is almost always fatal. Transport Canada did a study on this issue. They determine that a turn back is 8 times more likely to result in a fatal accident over a glide straight ahead. The key to surviving a light airplane crash is aircraft control. If you hit at gliding speed with the wings level and in a level or slightly nose up attitude you will survive pretty much regardless of what you hit.
I would suggest that this was a well flown emergency and the disparaging comments in some of the posts are out of line. I have 2 comments
1) This is a good example of the value of prefacing all emergency radio calls with Mayday. If she had she would probably not have to have a distracting call to the other airplane
2) I would be vey interested in finding out why the engine failed. Since between 2/3 and 3/4 of all engine failures are directly caused by the actions or in inactions of the pilot, I predict that this was in fact the case in this incident.