ST,
Sorry to hear about your friends.
I absolutely agree with your comment:
Regular forced landing practice to the surface!
I frequently fly a 265 HP C182 tow-plane and most days I try at least one glide approach from downwind, abeam the threshold. It's a stark reminder of how poor the glide ratio is, even with flaps up.
Glider pilots make glide approaches all the time of course, but the last part of the pre-takeoff check in Canada is Options - "Where will I go if the rope breaks or the tow-plane has a problem during the launch?"
This paid off for one of my club's pilots last week. He was doing a "passenger ride", flying from the back seat of a DG-1000. After takeoff at about 200' AGL, the audio variometer volume was overwhelmingly loud, so he asked his passenger to “flick the little switch on the control column” (which changes the vario setting in the DG-1000). The passenger asked if the pilot had meant the “yellow” knob?). The pilot misunderstood and heard“little”, not “yellow” and said “yes”. The passenger then pulled the release.
So from 250', the pilot made a perfect landing in a field with no damage to the glider. It was retrieved and after a de-brief with all concerned, the passenger went for another flight.
Of course, there has been a lot of analysis of what happened and the SOPs concerning passenger flying have been revised.
However, there was a large amount of luck in this incident. Of our four runways, only two have good landout options. If this launch had been on one of the other two, the outcome might have only been a "good" landing, rather than an "excellent" one.