Originally Posted by
BackPacker
A good landing in a bad field is more survivable than a bad landing in a good field.
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Words to live by. Flying schools IMO spend put far too much emphasis on some elaborate protocol for selecting a field, especially arcane discussions about what kinds of crops are best, how to deal with furrows, water puddles, farm animals, etc etc etc. The criteria I teach for for field selection is
simple
-Close (so you are sure you can make it)
-Open (as in no obstacles on the approach or big rocks walls ditches etc on the field)
-Big (to give you more options if you are high or low) and
-Flat, in that order.
And remember
better is the enemy of good enough. Go to the first "good enough" field you see and then concentrate on flying the aircraft to your chosen touch down point.
Finally a personal pet peeve is flying schools spend a lot of time about what to do when the engine fails but hardly any time talking about what to do with a partial power loss, which are far more common than total abrupt engine failures. In any case about 80% of all cases of total loss of engine power are
directly caused by the actions, or inactions of the pilot, so I think flight schools should spend a lot more time working on students preventing the engine from stopping in the first place, rather than just what to do when the engine suddenly stops.