I suspect that this subject will perpetually be discussed by pilots as long as airplanes are flown...
Hedley wrote:A friend of mine - a good stick - had an engine failure at 400 AGL after takeoff in a Harvard, a couple years back.
He turned around and landed it uneventfully on the departure runway.
With a bit of training, IMHO most pilots could do it. It's really not that hard. I've never really understood all the fuss about it.
If you train for something, you can probably do it. If you don't train for something, you probably can't do it.
Personally can or can't do it is irrelevant to whether it should be taught. You're right, the turn isn't hard and with a suitable ammount of training is easy - relatively - to accomplish safely. To me its a numbers game. Whether the turn can be made by a proficient pilot isn't the question, the question with the manuever is whether or not the decision to do so is going to result in a safe landing. There is also the aspect of whether or not the turn around has sufficient advantage to making an off runway landing straight ahead of the airplane. Turning around and not landing on a runway is generally more hazardous than landing ahead of myself off the runway.
Back to that numbers game though. Wait, not yet. Lets take a look at what the FTM says about the subject. Assuming we've gotten around the possibility of doing a bad turn and putting ourself into a spin...
...Experience and careful consideration of the following factors are essential to making a safe decision to execute a return to the aerodrome:
1) Altitude.
2) The Glide ratio of the aircraft.
3) The length of the runway.
4) Wind strength/ground speed.
5) Experience of the pilot.
6) Pilot currency on type.
For the sake of arguement the first four are really what needs to be known if one is going to make the attempt, I'll leave 5 and 6 until later in this discussion.
Pulling some numbers from the book for the 172 and dealing with only the first three factors mentioned, we can quickly see what's at play. If we suppose that after take off we're climbing at best rate, the airplane is climbing at a rate of 9.6:1 (for every 9.6' forward it travels, it climbs 1') its glide ratio however is only 9.1:1. Those numbers are SL performance, standard day, with no wind.
Before Strega steps in, the numbers are of course rounded with a bit of rough calculation. The important bit to draw from this is that those numbers are very tight.
Needless to say the numbers for the climb become worse as as we go up in altitude, so climb performance at 4000' ASL is down around a climb ratio of 11.4:1. To put those numbers into how this affects the topic of discussion if the airplane climbs from SL up to 400' is able to manipulate time and space as to not lose any speed or altitude in positioning itself for the return glide so that essentially it is gliding straight back the way it came, it will make 400' AGL 3840' from its point of rotation and glide back 3640'... In other words its return glide brings it back approx 200' from where it left the ground. Indeed will a max effort take off, the mighty 172 will only be around 500' from the threshold of a 4000' runway on return.
Naturally that means that hedley's feat is well within the realm of possibility even if we take into account altitude lost during the turn. In actuality, the turn back at a lower 400' is more possible/probable than say a straight climb to 1000' AGL where one will end up approx 500' away from one's rotation point. If one extrapolates this, naturally there becomes an altitude where the airplane will no longer be able to return and make the runway. This becomes more apparent if we increase the field elevation (assume again standard day, no wind, max gross weight, best rate of climb) taking off from 4000' ASL now at 400' AGL, assuming the same magical turn back for the sake of simple math we now end up approximately 900' away from our point of rotation when we return. If I climbed to 1000' AGL it puts me 2300' farther from my rotation point. Still doable on a 4000' runway? Remember as well though that now we've used more space during the take off too. Instead of approx 500' used prior to rotation, now we've used 1150'. Still doable by the simple math numbers, but it certainly makes things a bit tighter.
Naturally deviation from standard conditions affects things considerably, helping or hindering depending on which way you go. More than 4000' feet of runway also helps your margin considerably, shorter than that makes it considerably more dicey. Wind really plays havoc with the numbers, but in most cases, with the exception of a straight down the pipe headwind hurt your cause, any sort of tailwind in the process drastically reduces your chances of being successful. Throwing any obstacles into the mix also might limit your options.
Realistically now to give yourself the absolute best chances of making a turn back to the runway you need to know those numbers. I'm sure that many have it figured for their home field, do you figure it out for everywhere you go? Remember the numbers change as you get higher. Do you know exactly where your window is? More importantly when the prop stops you have a short time to recall that piece of information before the opportunity is lost. Any wasted time or movement dramatically reduces your chances.
*sigh*
I don't need to tell you people this though, and lets face it I'm only convincing the choir here. But I'll discuss shortly issues 5) and 6) above which are of course probably the two most pertinent to the discussion. The real problem here is that a majority of flying pilots out there if you asked them would answer that the are both experienced and current. According to TC you're "current" if you've flown within the last two years, hardly the proficiency that we really need out of pilots to give them the chance to execute this manuever sucessfully - that's if they realise that its only doable under the right conditions.
I've never really understood all the fuss about it.
The fuss is really not about whether pilots are able to pull off the manuever, but whether they can always make the decision correctly whether they should pull off the manuever. People are unfortunately very suceptable to gambling on the high risk/ high reward scenario. In my mind pilots must be trained against this tendancy. The problem being that pilots will gamble when they are not %100 sure of whether 1) to 6) of the above are favorable.
Getting long winded here, I feel I must reiterate that I think very poorly about Mr. Shiff's presentation. Both of his cases which are presented as "successes" are poor examples based solely upon "I survived" being the only real god part about them. They both scream of poor decision making and poor awareness of the situation. His second survival after all involves a collision with another aircraft - Its hard to imagine any scenario where that's your best option, or at least if you put yourself into it the poor chain of events that you participated in to lead to it. It does highlight another problem with the turn-back, how aware are you at the point when you make the decision to do so of what's behind you. Did someone taxi to position? In a floatplane scenario there's lots of things that move on a lake as he discovered. What about obstacles? I know at my home field some land developer in their infinite wisdom have placed a few that limit my turn back possibilities.
This also brings into question why ATC gave him grief when he turned back, doesn't sound like we're hearing the full story here. I've made an immediate turn around after take off to return to my departure end when I had a problem and ATC was totally cool with it, if not the best helpful bunch they could be.
Either way, we're not privy to really the full scenario of how he made it back successfully, conditions and what his options all were. The same might be said of Strega's excellent mooney driver. Yes he did a good job, but like BPF says, certainly looks like he had lots of altitude, there was certainly lots of runway (and two of them for even more options) where he was positioned in relationship to it, what the wind was like and the aircraft's performance - though obviously being winter certainly tips the scales in his favour.
I've talked long enough, but a few questions remain. Firstly, how would the proponents of the turn back like it to be trained, if indeed all that needs to be done is some extra training? Secondly, How much do you think that this will save the lives of pilots (and passengers) if this is mandated? Lastly given that current training on the suject you view is inadequate and that pilots as a majority are currently ill-equiped to deal with the scenario, do you think that training/licensing should be changed now?
