This short video of a forced landing in a Diamond trainer is one of our favorite videos!ever. But not for the reasons you might think. It’s not only because the “student” here made the forced landing, but because the instructor made this into an instructional opportunity, teaching it all the way as though it were part of the syllabus. Woot.
You need to watch a few times to figure out what’s going on, but we think we’ve got it figured out. The aircraft has lost power. Its prop is stopped. For all intents and purposes, it’s a glider. (Good thing Diamond builds nice gliders!)
There are abundant farm fields available for the landing, and the one they picked seemed like a good choice
But when we say “they,” who are we talking about? Well, the situation is this. The right seater isn’t the instructor. She’s the student, apparently a CFI student on an instructional flight. And since CFIs sit in the right seat, that’s where she is. And in this case, the instructor plays the part of the student, though he kicks into instructor mode to talk the CFI student through the landing. He also follows her through on the controls, though it sure looks as though she’s all over it.
And at the end, when they’ve come to rest just short of a fence, he calmly says, “Nice job.” We agree. And he was just as good.
There’s one other thing. One commenter online wondered what the “drunk saxophone” playing was. It was, of course, the stall warning horn. Now, if it’s going off, are they too slow? In terms of outcome, it’s hard to imagine a better forced landing. And being slow when you touch down on what could be a really rough surface is a great idea. And you are risking a stall/spin if you get too slow. They clearly didn’t, and their milking of the horn seemed just perfect under the circumstances, though some might disagree. In this case, the outcome says it all
