I was Back up at the school today for PPL lesson 25: PFL (Practice Forced Landings).
We took of an navigated away from the airfield to a quiet area where we could practice without being disturbed.
PFL’s (practice forced landings) are what you would do should your engine die on you and you are not able to restart it.
To be honest the process is not really much difficult than you would think.
- Try to restart – Of course you would attempt to restart the engine of your plane should it stop working. If it starts again, great! If it doesn’t then you….
- Shut it down – If the engine is dead and despite your best tries will not restart then you turn it off.
- Pick a field – Give your mayday call, pick a field, configure your plane, brief your passengers (Don’t worry, I got this) and make a forced landing.
You also need to make sure you pitch for 65kts which is the best glide speed in a Cessna 152. Another important consideration is your altitude, there are times when you will want to keep it and other times when you will want to lose it fast.
The methods for losing altitude are s turns which are just flying in S shapes to lose height. You can also slip stream which is the process using opposite rudder and aileron to get down quicker.
The weather when we were doing this was not the best then it came in really quickly. We ended up just about beating the weather when we came in to land. Surprisingly after doing endless landings last week this one was not great but I am going to put that down as a one off.
I have another lesson planned tomorrow depending on the weather as at the moment it is not ideal but maybe some flying will be managed.
