When I put my plane down in a marshy field (choosing what looked like a smooth field over the adjacent highway), the plane tumbled and was wrecked, I was unhurt (but biplanes have a built in roll cage).
Landing on Highways
- Thread starter Himayeti
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I hunt marshland here fairly often. Put on some rubber boots (preferably snake-proof) and wade a marsh and you’ll understand. Very uneven terrain, lots of dry berms next to deep waterholes, many gullies, thick vegetation, deep mud, etc. It would be very easy to flip a plane over.
Himayeti
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Himayeti
I appreciate the statistics for home builts.
But they would be only valid for that sub-group of planes which by the way usually are slow and easy to land.
So one must be careful with those numbers.
If we had another sub-group say for Malibus, the numbers I predict would be rather different.
So the weight and landing speed of your plane should definitely influence your decision.
Glad to have started this discussion. I've learned much. I'll still go for fields or water most of the time on a bigger plane. Gliders are messy on roads too because of their long wingspans. Maybe that's why I stay away from roads anyway.
But they would be only valid for that sub-group of planes which by the way usually are slow and easy to land.
So one must be careful with those numbers.
If we had another sub-group say for Malibus, the numbers I predict would be rather different.
So the weight and landing speed of your plane should definitely influence your decision.
Glad to have started this discussion. I've learned much. I'll still go for fields or water most of the time on a bigger plane. Gliders are messy on roads too because of their long wingspans. Maybe that's why I stay away from roads anyway.
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Morgan3820
Ejection Handle Pulled
I recall a picture( maybe you do also as it was not long ago) of a Mooney that had put down in a marsh near Beaufort, SC. I think Paul Bertarelli was part onwner but not the pilot. The plane was gear up and apeared to have slid it in upright. As an Arrow owner that flies near marshes at times, I am curious.
Maybe different types of marshes? Here’s a pic of a Florida marsh:
Another point about experimentals in the data. Most are probably fixed gear and more prone to flip over in a marsh.
Morgan3820
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So the lives of those who do not fly an airplane but drive a car are more valuable than those who choose to drive a car to their airplane and fly it, and have a really bad day?
Himayeti
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Every life is important. You are now delving into the issue that Tesla engineers have to deal with when programming the AI of their self driving cars.
The car is on autopilot and all of a sudden it has to decide who it's going to hit for whatever reason (say brake failure). A swerve to the right, and it takes out 5 grannies. A swerve to the left, 3 school kids, or go straight and you and your family fall off a cliff.
How do we build decision making into such systems?
In your example, is it morally acceptable to risk taking out a young couple and their baby so that you can save yourself and your grandson?
What about if you have not been careful with your plane's maintenance and the engine out is because you went past TBO? Because you were trying to save some bucks, is it OK for you to risk the life of others?
The point is that oversimplification is a big enemy in this discussion.
Many here practice confirmation bias while not wishing to realize that one death on the ground may simply be too high a number.
Thx
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Don
I haven't seen where he was when he lost power, relative to where he landed on US 74. Reports said power loss was at 5500' AGL. He was only about 5 NM from a private airport in Bryson city (Sossamon, 57NC) to the NE, at touchdown. SE, maybe 10 NM to Macon county airport. But west? Fubar.
But from the video, at least his "final approach" was from NE of his touchdown point. But of course if he didn't make Sossamon, there were a lot more people he could harm in Bryson City.
wanttaja
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Certainly there should be questions about using data from homebuilts to apply to the overall GA fleet...no argument from me.
However, I'm not sure whether the advantage lies with the homebuilts or the production airplanes.
Take the overall US fleet...about 288,000 airplanes of all types, as of January 1 of this year. What are the most popular GA aircraft? Let's say, the Cessna 150/152 series, the Cessna 172, the Cessna 182, and the whole Piper PA-28 series. These all add up to, roughly, about 62,000 airplanes. That amounts to about 22% of the overall aviation fleet.
At the same tally, there were about 27,000 Experimental Amateur-Built aircraft on the registry. About 7,000 of them...about 26%...were RVs.
With the possible exception of the Piper Arrows in the PA-28 fleet, the Van's homebuilts fly faster than anything in that sample of typical GA aircraft.
So, should we then expect the homebuilt statistics to be worse than the production aircraft? Sure, there are a lot of Kitfoxes, Pietenpols, and Fly Babies on the homebuilt registry. But the registry still has a lot of Piper J-3s and their descendants, and Aeroncas, and Taylorcrafts, and Cessna 120/140s, etc. And there are other high-performance aircraft on the homebuilt registry than the Vans, of course. Coincidentally, the number of Lancairs and Kitfoxes are about the same...about 3%, each, of the homebuilt fleet.
So I think the homebuilt data is a pretty good representation of what the overall GA fleet might be doing. Until someone gets as curious about the overall GA statistics as I have with the EAB data, it's about all we have.....
Ron Wanttaja
wanttaja
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You mean like claiming that the majority of forced-landings on highways result in injuries to the people on the ground, without a speck of data to back it up? "More often than not, people are hurt on the ground..."
Ron Wanttaja
Himayeti
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I think that once again you miss the point.
The question is, do I have the right to perhaps hurt somebody else because I'm in trouble? Your statistics may tell us that more often than not, it's not a problem, yet they don't address the issue.
Go talk to families of those who have died on the ground when hit by a plane, and see if your statistics allay their grief.
It seems that we only agree in that we disagree.
Changing the subject. Somebody mentioned there was an airport 5 miles away from the highway. How high were they when they lost the engine and what is the glide ratio of their plane? As an example, a 10:1 glide ratio at 2500 feet could take you 5 miles at best glide. In my Malibu which has a 15:1 ratio this would have been easy. This is the kind of quick math Sully did when he decided to set his plane down in the Hudson.
MauleSkinner
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Probably more that you missed the point in your OP.
donjohnston
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If you don't already know the answer to your own question, then you probably shouldn't be flying (or leaving your house).
Why do I get the feeling that we're being trolled here?
Himayeti
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I'm amazed by the sense of righteousness and entitlement that a few people have here. Being trolled now means not agreeing to be selfish and even a single life matters.
It NEVER crosses my mind to land on a highway if I lose my engine. I have many thousands of landings without an engine, so losing one is not something I panic about. I fly often over the Sierras where highways are non existent and any small pasture o lake is game. So please don't teach me about off airport landings or what a plane can do without an engine.
And no, I will not place the lives of others in peril to save my rear end. That gene of selfishness I don't carry.
End of discussion.
It NEVER crosses my mind to land on a highway if I lose my engine. I have many thousands of landings without an engine, so losing one is not something I panic about. I fly often over the Sierras where highways are non existent and any small pasture o lake is game. So please don't teach me about off airport landings or what a plane can do without an engine.
And no, I will not place the lives of others in peril to save my rear end. That gene of selfishness I don't carry.
End of discussion.
MauleSkinner
Touchdown! Greaser!
If you’re eliminating a potential safe landing site 100% of the time simply because it’s a bad place less than 5% of the time, you’re an idiot.
Capngrog
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I have rarely encountered a more sanctimonious, self-righteous, pharasaic post. This and your apparent unwillingness to keep an open mind is what makes many of us believe you are a troll.
GaryM
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I don’t care what choices himayeti makes when alone in the plane, but if passengers are involved the moral choice is to set down where there is the lowest chance of any fatalities, on the ground or in the air. That might well be a highway. There are plenty of places where runway/field/water aren’t options
Daleandee
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Kenny Phillips
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He prolly flies a 50:1 sailplane, not an 8:1 Cessna.
Tarheelpilot
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Lol.
Tarheelpilot
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Bless your heart. Good luck finding the echo you wanted. I recommend looking elsewhere. This crowd won’t abide such dishonesty. You might consider listening. Lots of learning opportunities here to those willing to learn.
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Mantis Toboggan, MD
Do you carry passengers and if so what is your obligation to them?
Nauga,
and any port in a storm
donjohnston
Pattern Altitude
Nobody here (other than yourself) suggested endangering others to save yourself.
And don't go away mad... just go away.
wanttaja
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It sounds like you're trying to discuss some aviation variation of the "trolley problem."
Me, I'm just a knuckle-dragging (retired) space engineer. If I lose an engine again, my utter focus will be on the same thing as the first time it happened: Setting the plane down without damage. I suspect this is pretty common to most of those in that kind of position. Coincidentally, pulling that off successfully prevents any damage to people or objects on the ground as well. Might give my wife's Aunt Jean conniptions (she's from the south) but I can live with it.
My curiosity was piqued, so I ran an analysis of the overall US accident statistics for 2011-2020 (e.g, both production planes and homebuilts). The NTSB database includes data fields that tally the number of people on the ground killed or injured. For that ten-year period, it came to 100 total cases, out of 17,787 total accidents. Boiled down to 44 deaths, 116 people with serious injuries, and 64 with minor injuries.
The first eye-opener: 41 of those 100 cases were ground handling accidents. People getting hit by propellers/rotors, lawn mowers crossing the runway at the wrong time, tug pulls an airliner over a ground handler's foot, etc. Some of them are a bit bizarre. Anyway, about ~18% of the fatalities and injuries were associated with these ground cases. I'll ignore these cases for now. So 59 accidents, of which 18 resulted in the death of a person on the ground, are left.
Four cases involved helicopters, I'll restrict the following to fixed-wing. That leaves us 55 cases where ground folks were injured by fixed-wing aircraft, including 16 accidents that produced ground fatalities.
Forced landings were less than half of that. 30 of the 55 occurred to aircraft with power available. Six of the thirty were stall/spin cases. Misjudged approaches, losing control during a go-around, student issue, a powered-parachute pilot veering off on takeoff, even hitting a skydiver in flight. 11 cases with ground fatalities, 13 cases with ground serious injuries. 26 total deaths.
Looking at forced landing cases...out of 25, there were five cases of fatalities on the ground, eight total deaths. Eight deaths on the ground over 10 years, and nearly 18,000 total accidents, from a fleet of nearly 300,000 airplanes. That's not much of a risk. Over the same time period, more than 60,000 pedestrians were killed by vehicles. More people were killed by sharks than died on the ground during someone else's forced landing.
If you're playing the Trolley Game, of course, the number of deaths is immaterial.
I'm pretty confident in my fellow pilots' desire to avoid ANY damage during a forced landing, which, again, reduces the chance of ground casualties. This is from their own self-interest, of course, not any noble sentiments. Sadly, it DOES too often result in a higher fatality rate (both in the airplane and on the ground) as pilots try too hard to save the airplane and end up stalling. I posted the survival statistics for various objects on the ground, worst-case being buildings at about 75% survival. These were based on NOT stalling the airplane. When someone stalls a homebuilt in an engine-failure situation, the survival rate is about 40%.
Personally, if I have to force-land my 1100-pound wood and fabric airplane, just because I maneuver to avoid a 5,000 pound Escalade doesn't mean I'm just looking for a softer car.....
Ron Wanttaja
wanttaja
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There were some interesting aspects to the data I extracted, so I dumped much of it to Excel, and have put it up on my web page for those who might be curious.
http://www.wanttaja.com/ground.xlsx
The narratives don't come across very well, but you can use the NTSB number to access the online reports.
The last column is named "Unusual". I set this flag when the situation was unusual, such as ERA18LA091. They were using a helicopter to transport ladders with workers on them in a manner that "...was contrary to company policy and Federal Aviation Regulation 27.865(c)(2)." Could argue whether this was, technically, a "ground" injury, but that's the way the NTSB recorded it.
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As always, thanks for the hard data and great analysis, Ron. OP stated in post 12 this is a moral issue. His or her personal moral issue, so I suspect this is a personal trolley problem that does not compute.
Tarheelpilot
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You’re the one that’s overly simplistic in the decision process and also extraordinarily arrogant about it as well. You’re claiming a position of moral superiority that is false.
Morgan3820
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Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe
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You just made my day sir. A new word.
Sifossifoco
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I just have to say it.... The correct spelling is 'pharisaic'
Pinecone
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Is that all? Sounds short. That is 5 to 1.
A C-172 is about 8.8 to 1. A Mooney is about 11 to 1.
Heck, a T-38 with that tiny wing is 9.6 to 1.
On the Lancair forum I read actual glide ratios from testing anywhere between 7:1 and 20:1. Specific to my model Lancair I read best glide speeds between 100 and 107 kts with descent rates between 600 and 1500 fpm. The 600 fpm claim states the prop be pulled back well below 1000 rpm or stopped. Perhaps I could get a little more, but I have consistently been able to make 1 mile per 1000 feet power back.
Capngrog
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You're right, and thanks for the correction.
My excuse is that while I was typing the word into my post, a meteor hit the small lake behind the house, scaring an alligator onto the back lawn, causing the panic-stricken saurian to gallop up to my driveway, where encountering the threatening profile of my SUV, it bit into a tire, causing a provocative (to a lust-crazed saurian) "hissing" sound, in turn causing the aroused said saurian to attempt mating with my vehicle, which caused me to miss my flight to Oslo to accept my Nobel Peace prize. My only other explanation (excuse) is that a combination of my aging eyesight and my aging brane resulted in the spelling error. Or maybe it was ...
