Originally Posted by
Pace
Say in your example that you are gliding down for a forced landing at 300 feet you decide there are unseen hazards on the landing strip you have selected.
You pull the chute and fall the 300 feet with the chute not fully deployed! You kill yourself while a collision under control you would have survived.
You could as easily argue that if you'd pulled the 'chute at 1000 feet, it would deploy correctly & you'd survive, but that by choosing to continue, you could be killed by the hazards you couldn't have seen until it was too late to deploy the 'chute.
I'm now thinking along the lines of setting a decision height after engine failure, at which point you look at what you can see, & either commit to continue to a landing, or pull the handle.
The biggest hazard could turn out to be prevarication. You need to have decided what you're going to do by minimum safe deployment altitude & then stick with it.
But if the donk quits at 5000 feet, you've time for evaluation & IMO it's poor airmanship to throw away the choice by sticking doggedly to a prepared plan, whatever that might be.
Stay flexible until you have to commit, but then stick wholeheartedly with your chosen option - in just the same way that I'd never try to land after commencing a go-around at decision height, even if the viz suddenly improved & I had good sight of the runway.