Originally Posted by
n5296s
At the end of the day it's only flying. The airframe doesn't know you're at 200 AGL.
This is quite true, however, a 200 foot error at 200 AGL will be far more noticeable to the airframe than the same error at 1000 AGL!
I am not that convinced on the 'impossible' land ahead options having flown out of just about every one of the fields mentioned. Places like Bembridge or Oban I have always assumed an engine failure at 200 feet would be a ditching - but close to shore and with a very high survival potential. For many of the other fields , there are reasonable patches that a no gear aircraft can slide to a stop within (after all, the gear is almost surely on its way up at this point - Murphy after all
).
A lot of this conversation is aircraft and environment specific. Full up, my Bonanza climbs slo o o w l y and on a straight out departure there is no turn back altitude from a short field (unless I am taking off into a gale), hence I prefer an early turnout which keeps me within range of the field (and with 90 degrees of the turn already done).
I would definitely encourage trying the manoeuvres. I was surprised at how nicely my plane pitches into best glide if I just 'let go' during an engine failure simulation (assuming I have set proper takeoff pitch). Equally, I tried flying turnbacks with a pretty good model of my aircraft in X-Plane and found hitting the runway was very hard, hitting the field from crosswind was pretty easy. Doing the theoretical turn at altitude was quite a bit easier than getting back after the randomly timed failures in the simulation.
Finally, as noted by others, I was also very surprised at how much of an improvement in glide ratio was achieved by going full corse on the prop.