I’m not convinced this should be labeled a failed impossible turn. He was a little over 1000 AGL when it failed. Had he kept going straight he would have ended up in the bay/lagoon, a turn left or right would have solved that. He decided to turn left, made the 180 successfully and had room to spare. It was after that when something went wrong. He may have done fine keeping a safe glide speed but then hit some trees and got spun around. I’d wait to see a picture of the actual site.
As far as “flat land” around there, even though there aren’t any hills to speak of, there are plenty of tall trees that would have made this much more than a simple off-airport landing. Maybe there’s a case to be made about just going straight ahead and putting it down in the water vs landing in the surrounding vegetation and trees.
Scouting suitable landing sites during climb out from an unfamiliar airport is not always an easy task.
Looking at the registration and recent flights I hope this is not one of those cases of an airplane that’s been sitting for an extended period of time only to get sold to someone that gets to experience how much it wasn’t maintained.
I'm not convinced he would have made it back. This is a somewhat arguable due to uncertainty in GPS altitude vs true altitude however. I see that ADS-B Exchange shows the same data as FlightAware, so at least in this case I don't think the FlightAware data is mangled by automated processing.
The last two pings are lined up exactly with the threshold of the runway, so it does seem that was the goal. First ping on departure indicates 300' altitude, which would be about 220 AGL, taking the GPS altitude w/o correction -- admittedly a big IF. The last ping is also at 300' (220 AGL), 9300 feet from the threshold of the runway. With a 9:1 glide ratio (what's the right number for a '79 Arrow IV?) the glide would be almost 2000 feet horizontal -- way short of the runway. From the point of the last ping, you would need an altitude of 9300/9 = 1033AGL to make it back to the runway. Even with GPS altitude uncertainty, I think that's a non-starter.
Above, I estimated the true airspeed over the last four pings was 60-65kts, and I suspect that is not best glide -- in the Turbo Arrow IV, best glide is 97KIAS (95KCAS). I don't know the number for this A/C however. Anyone? If you go back to the first ping after the a/c got turned around, 15,000 feet from runway, the required altitude for glide is 15,000/9 = 1667AGL and the ping there is only 850 (less the 80' field elev is 770 AGL). From those numbers I don't think there's any way the field could have been made, even with GPS altitude uncertainty.
I agree with you about the trees. Keep in mind the satellite image above is quite old -- it doesn't show many of the recent inprovements to the airport property, including a new Hilton hotel. In places where the trees are sparse, there appear to be many downed trees with a fair number left standing. Not a good candidate area for landing. Does it still look that way today? I don't know.
What about putting it down in the river? Below is a year-old image from a utoob video (May of 2021) on departure in a regional jet from RWY16 showing that area.
