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Emergency Approach and Landing

An engine failure does not take away your time to think. It fixes how much altitude you have to think in, and this maneuver is about spending it in the right order.

Emergency Operations — FI.XII.B

Why the maneuver exists

Cruising at 4,500 feet, the engine stops. What you are left with is a glider — a fairly good one, with a rate of descent you can predict and a range you can estimate. From that altitude you have several minutes, not several seconds, and they are enough to do this properly as long as you do not spend the first of them on the wrong thing.

So the maneuver trains five things at once: recognizing the failure, establishing best glide, choosing a field you can actually reach, working the checklist that might get the engine back, and keeping control of the airplane through all of it while a great many things compete for your attention. The goal is a suitable landing site reached safely and under control, flown for real all the way down to the point your instructor calls it off.

ABCDE, in that order

Five letters, and the order is a list of priorities:

1. Airspeed — pitch for best glide.
2. Best field — pick where you are going.
3. Checklist — try for a restart, or secure the engine.
4. Declare — tell someone.
5. Exit — prepare the cabin and the people in it for the landing.

Airspeed comes first and that part is not negotiable: the radio cannot save you and the checklist cannot save you if the airplane is not flying and not pointed somewhere survivable. Below that first line, treat the letters as priorities rather than as a queue worked strictly one item at a time. Your eyes can be sorting fields while your hand finds the fuel selector, and a controller you are already talking to hears about it early. What the order protects against is the reverse — letting the checklist or the radio pull you away from flying the airplane.

Airspeed

Best glide is the speed that gives you the most distance per foot of altitude lost. Fly faster and you trade altitude for speed you do not need; fly slower and induced drag eats the distance you were trying to buy. Pitch for it immediately and trim, because an airplane trimmed for the number holds it better than you will while you are busy with everything else.

Best glide is not the same as minimum sink. Minimum sink is slower and keeps you aloft the longest, which is a soaring number — distance is what you want here.

Wind changes the picture over the ground: into a headwind you cover less distance for the altitude you have, with a tailwind you cover more. Your best glide speed is a POH number for your airplane, and it changes with weight. Look it up on the ground, before the flight, so it is a number you already know rather than one you are hunting for while the propeller windmills.

The field

Four things decide it: wind direction, the surface, terrain and obstacles, and whether it is inside your glide range at all. A perfect field you cannot reach is not a field. Take the wind seriously — landing downwind into a short surface uses up a lot of the margin you were counting on.

The hard part is not the first choice, it is the second. If the field you picked turns out to be plowed the wrong way, or fenced, or ringed with wires you could not see from above, change your mind early while you still have altitude to trade. Fixation on a bad field, held all the way down out of stubbornness, is one of the reliable ways this goes wrong.

Planning the descent

Altitude is your bank account, and you spend it once. Fly something you can manage: a simulated traffic pattern if the geometry allows it, or a spiral over the field if you have height to lose, or whatever combination gets you there — the method matters less than arriving on a glidepath you can see working.

Keep the field in sight. If it disappears under the nose or behind the wing, you lose track of how much altitude you have and how much you need. And hold the flaps until you are certain you have the field made. They add drag, and it is far easier to lose extra altitude late than to find altitude you have already given away.

If you are flying something retractable, the gear is a different question and not a drag question at all. Onto a firm, smooth surface the gear is usually welcome; onto soft, rough, wet, or unknown ground it can dig in and put the airplane on its back, and a gear-up arrival that slides is often the better trade. Your POH's off-airport guidance is the authority for your airplane, and it is worth reading before you need it. Make the call when you choose the field, not on short final.

The checklist, and the radio

Once you are gliding toward somewhere, go after the cause. The usual suspects are fuel and ignition, but the specific actions belong to the airplane you are sitting in: which tank to select, whether there is a boost pump and when it goes on, where the mixture goes, carburetor heat or alternate air, the magnetos, the primer. The POH emergency section is the authority for every one of those items, and switch positions differ enough between types that a flow learned in one airplane can be wrong in the next. Learn your airplane's flow from its own checklist until your hand knows it by shape, and back it up with the printed list if time allows. If the engine is not coming back, the same checklist secures it.

Then declare. On 121.5 if you are not already talking to anyone, and squawk 7700; if you are already with a controller, say it on the frequency you are on. The word is mayday, said three times. Declaring costs you nothing and buys you every service the system has.

Before the ground arrives

The last item is the cabin, and it is the one most easily lost in the noise. Brief the passengers on what is about to happen and what they do once the airplane stops. Seat belts and shoulder harnesses tight, seats upright, loose items stowed where they will not become projectiles. Unlatch the doors before touchdown, so a deformed airframe cannot trap you inside. And with the field made and no further use for the engine, the POH checklist has you shut things down shortly before touchdown — fuel, ignition, master — to take fuel and electrical power out of the arrival. Run it in the order your checklist gives it. This is not the moment to improvise a shutdown.

What goes wrong

Four errors account for most of it. Forgetting best glide, so the first thing you spend is the altitude you needed. Fixating on a field that stopped being the right answer. Stalling on base or final, usually while stretching a glide toward a field that was always a little too far. And putting the flaps out early, which turns an approach that would have made it into one that lands short.

The distraction failure is subtler and worth naming. You are heads-down troubleshooting, the checklist is not finished, and the ground is arriving. There is a point where the checklist stops mattering — where a restart, even if it worked, comes too late to change the outcome — and past that point the only thing that matters is airspeed and glidepath. Decide in advance roughly where that altitude is for you, because it is a very hard call to make for the first time on final.

A field ringed with trees is not disqualified by them, but it needs a tighter pattern flown closer in, and the usable landing distance is measured from where you clear the trees rather than from the edge of the field.

Where you meet it next

On the practical test this is a simulated engine failure at altitude, and the examiner is watching for the same five things the maneuver was built to teach: recognizing the failure, best glide, a field you could actually reach, the checklist, and control of the airplane throughout. It is terminated before you get low. 14 CFR 91.119 sets the altitudes you may not descend below over people and property, your school's SOP usually sets a floor higher than that, and the instructor or examiner beside you makes the call on the day.

It also shows up every time you fly. Best glide is a preflight number, glide range is something you can estimate before you need it, and the habit of knowing where you would go if it went quiet is the part of this maneuver that outlives the checkride. Fly it alongside its neighbors: the power-off 180 is this approach with a runway underneath and no guesswork about the surface, short-field landings are where you practice putting the airplane on a spot you chose, and the slow flight and stall lessons are what keep the last hundred feet from becoming a stall on base. The surface wind you would be landing into is the one you already read before you left — Decoding METARs covers where it comes from — and the rest of the lessons are in Learn.