I see no reason to denigrate this guy on his performance, just pat him on the back and get him airborne again to continue the passion that fuels so many of us.
Yes I agree we shouldn't denigrate the pilot's performance and I agree the situation would not have been conducive to the pilot being in great physical shape by the time in the landing! I have not flown in Australia but Florida in August with 35 degrees and insane humidity can't be far off...it does definitely affect one's performance.
That doesn't mean people can't constructively opine though about situations like that in general, what might have been tried alternatively, what might have been done differently...just food for thought that's all. Just because I can't say (as I said at the start) hand on heart that I could do better doesn't mean I can't sit here and wonder about how it
might have been done better.
The grass will obviously cause less damage to the wingtip, but if the wingtip digs into the grass (instead of sliding over it) it may put severe strain on the spar in just the wrong direction (horizontal instead of vertical). And if the aircraft yaws through 90 degrees, you are also putting a severe sideways load on the remaining wheel and wheel attachment, which may cause damage there as well.
Interesting question...I actually think what the guy in the video may have been trying to do had good logic behind it...I'm no engineer but my perception of these things would go like this...
The hard is probably initially better because if you can keep the bad wing elevated then you have a better surface to maintain directional control. Although in the video he appears to strike the wing with the missing wheel on touchdown he quickly picks it up and maintains the aircraft straight on the runway for a few hundred metres after that. I would have thought that once you lose control authority to hold the wing up...that is the time to exit onto the grass. Hopefully by that time the speed would have been reduced to not put too much strain on the spar; I notice from the video that once on the grass the aircraft pivots around the landing gear stub (as one would expect). Provided the remaining wheel did its job of rotating as the aircraft spun around I wouldn't have thought there was
that much strain on the spar if the speed of rotation was low.
So perhaps in a perfect world he would have not braked so aggressively and waited for a lower speed before exiting the runway...again just thinking out loud...not trying to criticise as such...
By keeping a tad more speed and power on, it's easier to pick up the wing with the ailerons and bring things into a stable situation, before you pull the power and try to keep the aircraft under control for as long as you can with aerodynamics only.
Yes I think that is the strategy that I would try to adopt if this happened to me tomorrow. I'm not going to claim that I would achieve a level of success acceptable to the court of PPRuNe though...
Maybe this is something that we should be practicing from time to time?
Just looking at the POH for a slightly larger aircraft that actually gives some guidance on this issue. It just says to keep the weight (using the controls) on the good wheel, lower nosewheel immediately for steering, mixture to ICO and land towards the side of the runway with the good wheel to allow space for turning towards the bad one.