I am currently training for my night rating, any advice on forced landings at night?

The only advice I was given - turn the landing light on, if you don't like what you see, turn it off :}

Most night flying is around the local cabbage patch. I am therefore addressing the reality that very few GA pilots go any distance in SEPs at night.

Keep you eyes open during the day. Build up an awareness of the local cabbage patch. It will give you an idea where to go at night - and perhaps more importantly where not to go.

Its about as good as it gets.

Fly a Cirrus :) One occasion when I would pull the chute in the event of an engine failure :ok:

Pace

When teaching the forced approach I spend hardly anytime on field selection criteria. Close, Open (no obstacles on the approach) and Flat in that order are the only criteria care about.

My 02 cents

1) 80% of all engine failures are directly caused by the actions or inactions of the pilot. Flying schools should stop concentrating on teaching complicated pneumonics for selecting the "right field" and obsessing about the relative differences in the suitability of crop types or farm animal species, and spend more time in educating pilots on how not to cause the engine to fail and if it does, get it going again

2) A uniform 9 Gee deceleration from 60 kts to 0 kts requires about 25 feet. Obviously it would be hard to get a perfectly even deacceleration of that magnitude but the take away is you don't need a lot of room to stop.

3) The instant the engine stops the insurance company just bought the airplane. The only criteria for success in a forced landing is no passenger injuries. What the airplane looks like when it comes to a stop is utterly irrelevant, see point 2 above.

4) Further to point 3 the accident statistics clearly show that the key to survival is having the aircraft hit the ground in as close to a wings level, level flight attitude as possible with a short ground run. The "killer" accidents are the ones where the aircraft hits the ground steeply banked/nose down not under control or hits a solid object at flying speed. Keeping the aircraft under control is the most important thing a pilot can do if the engine fails.

5) if you are cruising along sitting behind a certified Continental or Lycoming engine which had its fuel drained of contaminates, had a normal run up, is supplied with sufficient fuel from a properly selected tank, and you are regularly checking it's engine gauges and checking for carb ice......the chance it will suddenly and without warning, fail is basically zero.

6) The only truly safe way to deal with a night engine failure is to always be in gliding distance of a lighted airport.

In gliders, you usually have several minutes to pick out a field. A number of times I have spent a good part of an hour or more hanging by my fingernails near a chosen field until I either got away or had to use it.

Wave sites can be different and once on my way back in serious sink in an L-33 low performance glider (3rd flight in type), I was checking out various crops very shortly before finding that the best field was where I needed to land. That day the towplane managed two more miles than I did from release:\

In power, you are coming down at 800'/min; so don't look too far if flying a couple thousand feet up. Frankly if the weather is keeping me that low, I start playing hopscotch from one decent looking field to the next and will go off track to keep good fields within reach.

As BPF has wisely noted a successful forced landing is one where you and the passengers walk away.

Make a GOOD approach to the field that you are absolutely sure you can make halfway down. A touchdown well into the field will do a lot to avoid wires.

If you see a power line, i.e. poles, at the boundary, aim for well above a pole and plan to add flaps and/or sideslip once over.

Assume there is a pole line around the field boundaries and along any roads or driveways -- and then look for any pole lines running across the field as there was in my first outlanding.

My outlanding checklist is SSSLOW

Surface
Slope
Stock
Length
Obstacles
Wind

A deeper problem is that so many pilots are enamored of a 2-mile final on a glideslope similar to an ILS. Get used to power off approaches so you are familiar with where you will contact terra firma.

BPF

Excellent points but cannot agree with the above statement! I had an engine failure in an almost new Seneca Five! The engine went after takeoff at grosse weight in the climb out at 200 feet.
Very bad vibration and yaw but as the engine was still producing a small amount of power and I instinctively knew pulling it would mean a certain descent I kept the thing going one hand ready on the prop lever!
I struggled to 800 feet agl by which time the vibrations were so bad I had no further choice but to feather and shut down the unit,
A circuit at 800 feet and successful landing.
One of the PAX was a keen movie maker and filmed the whole takeoff engine power clearly visible!
Continental declared it must be over boost on takeoff as three rocker shafts had sheared clean off!
The film proved otherwise! The engine was removed for examination and an admittance from continental that all the rocker shafts had been mistakenly over torqued at manufacture! A complete new unit arrived on warranty within 2 weeks.
While I take your point on mismanagement engines do fail unilaterally especially pistons and that shows in stats comparing pistons to turbines which are far more reliable.

Pace

There's another S which works for glider pilots. If the farmer has been spreading "natural" fertiliser on the field, its probably at least got a firm surface and is fairly smooth!

Gliders can be washed but the retrieve crew will take the p***:ok:

Thats probably the most important thing said on the subject... and keeping that at the centre of everything you do will be the thing that saves your life one day.

On the night navigation part of my NR I asked my instructor what we would do if the engine quit and he replied "aim for a motorway and land in the direction of the traffic".

Not sure I agree with that advice. If it's lit (which by definition it must be) surely you're going to be hitting streetlamps, quite apart from the risk of hitting/being hit by a car or truck.

I should have thought the best bet would be maintaining a controlled descent and then using the landing light at low level to either land in a field or, if over woodland, bellyflop into the treetops at just above stall speed.

For the circuits knowing where the open ground is just after the runway end, and therefore where to aim if it all goes quiet is my strategy. I'm also being disciplined to keep a tight circuit so I can be sure of reaching the runway from a glide.

I will not be doing ANY night flying in an SEP if I can avoid it, once the NR is completed. Way too stressful despite the still air and great views!

Pass Your Message.

Forced landing at night I was taught turn into wind, slow down gradually putting down full flap and trim all the way back. Aim for a dark bit and keep wings level.

It works on most of the common Cessnas and Pipers by giving the best balance between rate of descent and low forward speed.

D.O.

At my initial medial the AME responded to my questions about night flying by stopping what he was doing and stating; 'If you intend flying a single engine aircraft at night I may have to consider you mentally unfit to hold a PPL'!

BB

airport to airport
 

while england may not have that many GA or other airports, the idea of night flying here has encouraged altering a straight line course a little bit to more closely keep lighted airports within gliding range from cruise altitude.

so zig zag a tiny bit and overfly airports and have a better chance of having somewhere pleaseant to land.

any area, except airports, at night that is illuminated is likely well populated, like HOUSES where innocents are...

landing on a ''motorway'' or freeway as we might say is a good idea if you are over mountainous terrain...for example flying from san francisco to reno...huge mountains...but alter your course and follow interstate freeway 80 and you have a chance...and much easier to be found after a crash than in wilderness areas.

no, nightflying emergency landings are tough...throw in mountains or oceans or lakes and its tougher...so alter your course and you increase your chances of an option.

Rather a gross generalisation. There are a lot of large flat fields in some parts of Scotland and Yorkshire, and plenty of places (Cotswolds, Chilterns for example) in England where finding a decent field is almost impossible. The only way to be sure there will be large fields is to plan the flight that way, with the help of OS maps and Google Earth.

Smooth it certainly is.

My first (and I still hope last) experience of landing in such a field was that "muck" has incredibly low friction and I kept going right across the field until my aircraft (thankfully a pusher) stopped in a 4ft high pile of the stuff at the far end.

I flew out of the field, but the rest of the day was spent washing the aircraft!

P

I was given the same advice as in post #31 above when flying night SEP. Now I am older (I got my PPL in 1978) I know better and avoid flying at night although the experience is unforgettable.

My thinking is that if flying at night now in a SEP I'd want to wear a parachute......too many dark empty fields have ditches and dry stone walls for my liking!

MB

Sevenstrokeroll

The rate that our beloved airfields are turned into housing estates (Bye Bye Bristol Filton ) And the fact that the majority of other airports are closed in the dark hours in the UK means you would be hard pushed to jump from airport to airport.
Even our Dads Army of Airforce bases are closed for large portions of time and not open at night!

Unless of course you fancy force landing at Heathrow :ok:

There maybe limited areas in the USA where that would be possible

Pace

we have lots of airports, many with pilot controlled lighting for night use...california has about 500 alone!

following roads (vfr) usually keeps you near cities/towns and many towns have little airports.

then the fields of the great plains are simply great for planes.

Print these pages off and take them with you every time you fly.

Regards.

Reckless LAA type pilot.

Or should that be Wreckless?

I suggest you re read my post. I indicated that IMO the chances of a sudden failure (not partial failure) but failure which in this context means no power, in cruise where there is no prior warning and/or the pilot actions/inactions caused the failure is basically zero.

In other words the scenario that all flight schools use as the start of the forced approach exercise which involves a sudden and complete loss of power with no warning is in fact the least likely engine failure scenario according to any review of accident reports.

In your example you did not have an engine failure you had a partial engine failure followed by a shut down by you at the moment of your choice. If you had being flying a single engine aircraft I would assume you would have used the remaining power to reduce your rate of descent and to assist you in manoevering the aircraft towards the most open area running the engine to destruction if necessary.

The bottom line is that the type of failure you had is very rare yet almost all of the training in flight school forced approach training situates that most unlikely event as the reason you will need to carry out the forced approach manoever.

Why are we spending so much time practicing something that almost never happens while devoting so little time to educating new pilots on avoiding the pilot caused engine failures that are responsible for 80 % of the engine stoppages ?

There was a very interesting article in the accident report section of Pilot magazine a few months ago. It involved a pilot flying a UK Pa 28 which suffered a total loss of power. He executed a good forced landing in difficult circumstances which result in no injuries, albeit with extensive damage to the aircraft. He was quoted as saying that he regularly practiced forced approach and credited that practice for the successful outcome of his emergency.

Good news story right ? Well not really as the reason the engine failed was because it was a December day with high humidity with an OAT of + 5 C and he failed to properly anticipate the need for carb heat and then failed to appreciate the signs of developing carb ice and let the ice build to such an extent the engine failed. It would seem to me that instead of spending all his time practicing force landings, if he spent a little of that time learning about the cause and prevention of carb ice there would be one less wrecked Pa 28 in England today........