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Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 08:37:08 -0600
From: Snowbird <snbird@ibm.net>
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Subject: Re: landing on highway?
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HLAviation wrote:
 
> It kinda depends on what part of the country you live in.  In an 
> urban setting I fully agree that highways are  lousy choice, but the
> choice may only be where can I go to kill the least  people which 
> depending on your exact situation but may infact the highway may be 
> the best of pisspoor options.

All good points.  I didn't mean to be saying one should never
consider a highway.  I guess it just seems to me that whenever
the "emergency landing site" issue comes up, people talk a lot
about highways.  I don't know but I wonder if it's because so
many pilots never land on grass, were even forbidden to land
on grass, so pavement looks like "place to land plane" even
though many highways seem to have no more relation to a paved
runway than a soft plowed field has to a well-drained and 
smoothed grass strip.

When I drive along highways, they frequently just don't look like
all that good a bet to me.  Wing-level highway signs, ditches
and culverts in the medians, overpasses, utility poles and
then to top it off the chance of taking out some driver who
is minding her own business taking the kids to daycare or something.

I'd do it and not think twice if it were my only choice, or
if the other choices were clearly worse (in terms of # of people,
or no flat place at all for example).  Or if the highway was
flat and empty and almost deserted.  But I think I'd pick
someplace I'm fairly certain would trash my plane, like a 
soft ploughed field or a swamp, over a busy highway.

Y'know I read a lot about small airplane accidents before I learned
to fly (while my husband was doing it).  And one thing which always
struck me was the incredible damage to the plane which the people
walked away from -- provided the pilot maintained control and went
in slowly.  Then I started flying as a "pinch hitter" sort of thing,
and my CFI made me do lots and lots of slow flight and stalls and
stressed to me that for survivability, the landing doesn't so much
matter what's important is to keep flying, get slow, and not stall.

I guess that's really what I'm getting at, to point out that any
slow, controlled landing is likely surviveable (that's what the
accident record says, the plane may be trash), so that being the
case is a highway really as much of a good idea as the attention
it seems to get?

> I didn't realize that acceptance and haunted by were mutually 
> exclusive.  

Well, no, but there's a special quality to the "haunting" when
the answer to:

> The question is always "Did I do the best I could under the given > circumstances?".

is tenuous, that's really what I'm getting at.

Snowbird


