This thread is about making decisions with flight safety as the paramount factor.

It is evident by reading the posts that there is a fixation on the terrain in the British Isles, where due to the dense population the motorways and roads are generally not safe to attempt a forced landing on.

HOWEVER.. Pprune is read world wide and there are thousands of motorways and country roads in other parts of the world that not only make excellent emergency landing sites but have very low traffic levels permitting their safe use for landing.

Lets try crunching this problem in our craniums.... we are flying along and the engine quits. Below and within safe gliding range is a farm with a thirty foot wide paved runway used by the farmer. But there are also a couple of big fields with various crops growing and one freshly plowed.

Now lets all concentrate real hard and sort out our options here, I bet not many of you would opt for any of the fields.

Therefore a motorway, highway or road with few or no obstructions should be your choice for an emergency landing rather than a field with an unknown surface.

Good airmanship requires us to think ahead of our airplanes and part of good airmanship is noting suitable landing sites as you progress along your chosen route. When checking your position on the ground to the track line on your map "ALWAYS" look for the best landing site as well as your location.

Fly safe:)

Cat Driver

.............
:D The hardest thing about flying is knowing when to say no.:D

Exactly Cat Driver. Obviously a busy motorway in a city is not a good choice for a forced landing area, but the rural highways in some countries are perfect (those where the trees are well back from the edges and power or telephone lines absent). Having said that though it would be just my luck to have a huge Mack come round the bend as I was landing! I have also pondered the use of a stretch of highway as an ideal precuationary landing area, after all, you can use it to safely take off again after the danger causing the precuationary landing has passed. Embarassing would be writing the machine off trying to get airborne after a perfectly good precuationary landing away from an airfield.

Kermie

It's an interesting question but I don't feel that there's one answer to this. I'm sure most of you guys have considerably more experience than my 100 hours but during my PPL training I was told to land on roads as a last resort for the reasons already discussed here.

However I'm currently in South Africa and am going to be flying up to Namibia (for those who don't know a country consisting largely of desert and mountains and about 4 times as large as the UK- population <2m).

In my flight planning I am considering what I would do in the event of forced landings. I think that given the roads there have very little traffic I'd be using them in such an event. It's also the best hope you have of someone actually coming your way in order to provide assistance. The only problems with roads in africa is that usually they have power lines running parallel to the road so that's also something which would need to be taken into account. By the way there's no nicely farmed fields in the Khalahrai either.

Speedbird 056

As Cat Driver has already said, its a matter of understanding the best option available at the time.

:)