I can’t claim any heroics. I’m certainly not in the class of some, who’ve handled more emergencies than I have had hot dinners. I think it was former CAA test pilot Chris Taylor, who was reported to have during his career suffered two Maydays, one ditching and 19 engine failures leading to 10 forced landings, including two on the same day! I’ve suffered just one of the latter.

My ‘sudden silence’ happened about six years ago, when flying a vintage, open cockpit Tipsy Trainer  and a broken crankshaft necessitated my parking in a suitable piece of pasture.

I hasten to add that I was a bit reluctant to write this. I am well aware that there are plenty of more skilled hands who have successfully pulled off forced landings in far more arduous circumstances than I. I penned this as others reckoned there would be lessons to be learned from the experience, to a relatively low hours PPL. OK then, so there I was…

 …enjoying a pleasant summer’s evening over the Chiltern Hills and heading back to my base at Bicester, about 40 minutes into a planned hour-long local flight. I’d (thankfully) just cleared the Chilterns ridge and was at about 1,500 feet on the QNH, therefore about 1,200 feet over the Vale of Aylesbury when things started to go wrong.

Lesson number one. How often have you found a small town on your course and thought, “yeah, a thousand feet will be plenty to glide clear…”?

Well, both I and the residents of Princes Risborough can be pretty thankful that I had decided to pass abeam. Had I not elected to fly around the edge of the town, I reckon the Tipsy and I might have found ourselves in a little bit of a predicament!

There were four or five hammer-blows of heavy vibration and the engine seized solid. My first thought as I looked at the (very) stationary propeller-tip ahead of me was “This is for real then…”. By then I was already passing through 1,000 feet.

Lesson number two. Things happen very quickly!

I guess that planning a circuit is fine if an emergency happens at a higher level. There is also a general wisdom that most piston engines, particularly traditional designs, will give you lots of warning before they progressively fail. Don’t bet on it. I reckon I had five to ten seconds to pick a spot and plan an approach.

However, I knew I was already pretty well nose-on into any wind and frankly, any field more than half a mile away or more than 30 degrees off the nose would have been out of the question. I knew I’d lose about 650 feet in a gliding 180-degree turn, so anything other than some S-turns to position me on a base leg was also out of the question.

Lesson number three. It is easy to think that somewhere like the flat Vale of Aylesbury is one big forced landing area.

Actually, when it comes to putting theory into practice, the options became a bit more limited. I rapidly applied the Five Ss: Surface, Size, Shape, Surroundings and Slope, to three potential fields within comfortable gliding distance.

The first I rejected because it had standing crop, almost certain to turn the aircraft over. The second had a couple of trees on the approach and looked newly planted. I rejected this too, as the surface again looked unfriendly. The third field was smaller than the other two, but had a clear approach over a low hedge and a good grass surface, plus a road and some bungalows along one side, so help might be forthcoming if the worst happened. It was not so much I chose the field, it chose me!

By this time, as far as I can remember I was flying the aeroplane by feel and instinct, with only the very briefest of glances at the airspeed. Obviously an open cockpit helps, but there’s another lesson – how well do you really know your aeroplane?

Looking back, I consider myself very lucky. I did some things that could have been dangerous. For a start, I committed the sin, not uncommon I understand in novice glider pilots, of getting too close and too high in relation to the selected field. That necessitated some increasingly desperate S-turning and side-slipping in the final stages of the approach, which could easily have made me a stall/spin statistic. Knowing my aeroplane helped, but maybe the luck of a fool played a part too.

So saying, a little bit of surplus airspeed or height is far better than the other alternative, right down to the landing. Compared with a conventional approach with idle power, the aircraft needed a significant flare to arrest the sink. With a low inertia or high drag aeroplane, it is very easy to lose that ability to arrest the descent.

I was also well aware that even if I landed long, I wasn’t just committed to running in a straight line. I landed slightly to the left of the centre of the field, with the idea of turning away from the far hedge to extend the run into an L-shape. What I hadn’t appreciated from the air, though, was the direction I turned across was in fact slightly downhill. Luckily I came to a stop anyway!

Also, I have to admit that although I tightened my belts and turned off the switches, I didn’t get to turn off the fuel tap until after I came to a halt. Had it all gone wrong, that could have produced a very different outcome. Maybe I should have carried out proper pre-landing checks? My excuse is I was too busy flying the aeroplane at the time!

I have also been asked about a ‘Mayday’ call. Well I was non-radio, so I didn’t have the option, but even if I had, I think it would have been a dangerous distraction at such a low level.

So, in summary, I got away with it, but what are the top three things I learned from my experience? Well firstly, it was amazing how quickly everything happened, there certainly wasn’t a lot of time to get through my memory items. Getting a checklist out certainly wasn’t an option for me. Secondly, despite getting too high on approach, recent practice in slow speed turns and side slips helped and thirdly, remember ‘glide clear’ if you are crossing even a small town, I could so easily have become someone’s garden ornament! 

Join Steve, Matt and Chris at our Emergency Handling Workshop on Wednesday the 18th of May to hear more about this, how to handle emergencies and how to avoid some of the pitfalls.