Landing into wind is important - a 10 knot tailwind versus a 10 knot headwind on a 60kt approach means almost double the kinetic energy. The energy has to go somewhere. If you are lucky and it is a big enough field it will just heat up the brakes, but in the mean small fields around my part if the world it will probably go into the airframe.
Yes landing into wind is important, but too often it is treated as an absolute in that students are told they "failed" because they took did chose a downwind approach. If the only good place to land is a field downwind of them do we want them programmed to try to circle around so they can land into wind as the only way to do it the "right" way, I think not
If you are lucky and it is a big enough field it will just heat up the brakes, but in the mean small fields around my part if the world it will probably go into the airframe.
You are treating the forced approach as if it were a landing, it is not , it is a crash. The most important part of the forced approach maneuver is to get the airplane to your intended flat area where it is going to hit the ground. In a perfectly executed forced approach this will be nose high and slow when you touchdown, but you do what you have to do . If you are high and fast then you may need to smash the aircraft into the ground with forward stick to avoid floating in ground effect until the airplane hits the obstacle at the end of the field at flying speed and people die.
Plenty of practice helps. Glide approaches from abeam the numbers or from the overhead are a very useful way to develop judgement of the glide all the way to a landing. Pulling the throttle randomly during later exercises helps the student to be ready and have the drills nailed.
Absolutely
A partial failure (eg loss of power, or rough running) is a bit neglected in the syllabus. Exercise 17 (Precautionary Landings) is very difficult to teach realistically and it is boring if done 5/600 ft higher than the real thing. Any ideas for that one?
Some ideas
1) Tell them the oil pressure is dropping and the oil temp is rising and they have 10 minutes to get on the ground
2) Reduce the power to a value that will allow them to maintain around 1.5 VS
in level flight and tell them they have a partial engine failure
You don't even have to fly the whole maneuver, getting the student to come up with a good plan is the most important part of the exercise