Gutted

Best Practice Forced Landing ever, except ….

….I didn’t make the sodding field. ARGGH!

It has been a while since I did one of these, and even though I was getting better at them, I know that I still struggle with all the ancillary stuff. The engine warming, the cause check, the mayday call and so on.

Knowing this I devised a plan, actually when I was in a very boring meeting I sat dutifully taking notes. Except they weren’t on the topic being discussed, it was a flow chart of events to be carried out for a PFL. Once I’d written it out a few times, I was fairly confident that I’d got a bit of a handle on what to do. I broke it into little steps, fly a bit, do some ancillary stuff, fly a bit, then some ancillary stuff and so on.

It seemed to have worked. Bob cut the power. I picked an awesome field, even managed to pick out a decent key point to help plan my approach. I knew what I was doing. I had this nailed. The engine was dutifully warmed every 500ft or so, my passenger briefing consisted of more than “OMGWEREALLGOINGTODIE”. I kept the field in sight and was on track. On short final I was pretty confident that all was going well, we were going to make it. I announced this to Bob and dumped my flaps.

Big mistake.

I’d misjudged just how strong the winds were. I came up short by a matter of metres, maybe even centimetres.

I’d blown it.

One more second, maybe. Or one less notch of flaps initially and I would have been celebrating my finest victory to date.

Instead I was left cursing at the world in general and myself in particular.

Bob made me fly back round to my key point and start the approach again. Nailed it perfectly this time. But of course that doesn’t count at all.

You only get one shot at the real deal.

When I’ve got a bit more time I plan on putting videos of both attempts up on YouTube. I will admit that I was sorely tempted to edit the two together and not say anything because I swear you wouldn’t have noticed the difference.