Successful forced landing into trees (West Quebec)

David Megginson

David Megginson

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Another reminder that even a forced landing into trees has a good chance of survival, as long as you keep the plane under control all the way to the ground (and until the last part stops moving).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/plane-crash-petawawa-july-24-1.6116515?cmp=rss

Contributing factors: both her ELT and her Spot worked, there was already a CASARA search plane in the air nearby, and she was just 40 nm north of CFB Petawawa and not too far from CFB Trenton (a major SAR centre).
 
sarangan said:
Even a high speed horizontal impact into trees is more survivable than a stall/spin.
Click to expand...

You are totally correct with this.
Search Forced Landing Into Trees and go to the AV8TOR SAFETY website to learn more.

It so happens that trees are the most prolific and best energy-absorbing ‘obstacles’ that can be used for absorbing the kinetic energy of an aircraft, when in a largely horizontal orientation and flying close to stall speed!

FLIT: Forced Landing Into Trees provides pilots with multiple additional potentially life-saving emergency forced landing options when traditional emergency forced landing options are few.
 
But there are trees, and there are other trees. Out in the rainforests of BC are huge cedars and Douglas firs. Cedars to 200 feet and firs to 300. You hit those, and you'll end up dropping out of control for that altitude. Not good, but better than rocks and probably better than cold water.

Smaller, weaker trees are best. Aspen, maybe, alder, basic scrub stuff.

Many years ago I used to fish along the Clearwater river in BC. Once we went across the river in a rowboat (risky, as it's fast white water) and fished a stretch seldom touched by man anymore. In that forest there were massive stumps of cedars that had been cut in the years before the first world war, largely by English immigrant workers. They were dragged to the water by a stationary steam engine that had been shipped from England and offloaded near Bella Coola, then it dragged itself along on its skids by its winch and cable all the way to the logging site. Took months. When the war broke out, those loggers went back to fight and never returned. The steam donkey is still there, settling into the soil. The size of the stumps was amazing. I managed to scramble far enough up one of them to see the rotted-out center; could have dropped a half-ton pickup into the hole. Stump would have been over 12 feet through at the butt. Big trees.

upload_2022-12-31_11-53-56.jpeg

Not friendly to crashing airplanes. At all.

They're still cutting a few:

upload_2022-12-31_12-20-9.jpeg
 
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Careful or you might leave a smoking hole.
 
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