Bose-x: You are, of course, strictly correct. I plead senility, or perhaps I was still annoyed at the "other" thread.
Dobbin: you don't need much of an open area to do this and, as wood73 did, the final practice can be done near the airfield (but then it's difficult to convince the stude to use timings and not to cheat).
Our standard brief was:
- Pick field and direction: as for FLWOP
- Inspect: fly down intended landing strip at 400-500 ft AGL, note heading, use time to estimate LRA, continue into wind for 30 secs after end of landing area, pick a landmark, fly crosswind for 30 secs, pick a landmark, fly downwind for 60-75 secs, pick a landmark, fly base for 30 secs, turn onto heading, let down to 50-100 ft
- Detailed inspection: as above, climbing to safe height after the inspection until timings say you're back on final approach
Note: use DI to estimate drift allowances on legs.
The message is that, while it's better to keep the field in sight, timings work well enough to be able to find the field if you lose it.
HFD