2.10 Precautionary landing
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5 minute read
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This page can contain a collection of personal notes, steps to remember, finished and unfinished content. Please excuse brevity.
Do not use specific information given like fuel flow, landing/take-off distances for your flights. Always refer to the POH of your exact plane for flight preparation. My information is just for references that I used.
Introduction
| Lesson number | Lesson name | Lesson date(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 2.10 | Precautionary landing | 21-09-2026 |
In this lesson, we performed the Precautionary Landing exercise. This is a separate exercise from the other lessons we did till now, and focusses on to land the aircraft in a moderate controlled way outside of any aerodrome but in a field. As we still have our engine, primary and secondary flight controls, we are less dependent on those critical factors.
Causes of you having to perform a precautionary landing are often to save lives without any aerodrome in range while still having an engine and flight controls:
- Fuel miscalculation or suspected fuel leak
- Sick passenger on board
- End of daylight period and/or planned aerodrome(s) closed
- Lost in the vicinity, no contact with GPS, other aircraft
- Unplanned weather deterioration, or getting not suitable for VFR conditions
The weather during this lesson
Today we had a great day for flying in terms of visibility, clouds and precipitation but the winds were very variable. We had a variable wind between 230 degrees and 020 degrees, and about 7 to 11 knots. The METAR of a close airfield, which are the actual measures reported this:
METAR XXXX 211355Z AUTO 30010KT 230V020 9999 SCT041 19/09 Q1030=
Let’s extract this information:
| METAR information | Explaination |
|---|---|
| AUTO | Automatically generated by weather station |
| 30010KT | Wind source: from 300 degrees (to 120 degrees) with a speed of 10 knots |
| 230V020 | Wind variable between 230 degrees and 020 degrees |
| 9999 | Visibility: 10 kilometres or more |
| SCT041 | Scattered clouds (3/8 to 4/8 coverage) at 4.100 ft above the ground (AGL) |
| 19/09 | Temperature (19) and dew point (09) in degrees celcius (52% humidity) |
| Q1030 | Air pressure at sea level: 1030 hPa |
| = | End of METAR |
Enough about the weather, let’s dive into the exercise.
The exercise explained
So the Precautionary landing exercise is somewhat different from the Forced Landing exercise, as we still have our engine and our primary/secondary flight controls. As we have this, we can make a landing in a much safer way than just putting it what is within our gliding range and wants us to first do an inspection run of the chosen field.
During the inspection run, we will fly at a constant speed of around 70 knots and count how long it takes from start to end of the field. This tells us by a rule of thumb how long the field is so we can decide to land there. We check the following things during this run:
- Time from start to end
- Trees, power lines
- Field material (softness, condition)
- Cattle/animals
- Objects at the start and end of the field
- Other possible risks
As we can count the time from start to end at around 500ft, we can use this rule of thumb to get an indication (not exact) of the available landing distance:
Indicated airspeed : 2 x seconds = distance traveled
__
This means, traveling 100 knots in 10 seconds is 500 meters, 62 knots in 20 seconds is 620 meters. The amount of knots devided by 2 is meters per second.
The exercise looks like this, where I have added the several steps:
So we fly 2 circles around the field, first to inspect and then to prepare and land like a normal circuit. Then we perform a soft field landing. On the last downwind, we could make use of our radio capability to inform the tower or flight information services that we need medical assistance. This can result in having that assistance minutes earlier.
Remarks
So we have performed this exercise around 3 times in this lesson. It went not perfect but also not bad. I chose the right fields to land on, preferably into the wind which gives us less ground roll. The first time, I was not perfect on speed with flaps 20 and with 10 knots of wind so I was corrected. The second and third time were much better and the third time actually having a good approach to the field with good speed.
After 3 times, we headed back to the airfield for 3 circuits with crosswind with okay landings but crosswind flying and landings are a good training area as this requires much more precise flying.
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