Water or Trees?

When faced with a controlled forced landing, water offers little danger. Surprisingly, the same is true of heading for the trees.

paulb

Wednesday, July 03, 2002 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By: Omar Filipovic

Key Takeaways:

Both controlled ditchings in water and forced landings into trees offer similar high survival rates (around 90%), challenging the prior assumption that water was significantly safer.
While survival rates are similar, forced landings in trees carry a significantly higher risk of serious injuries compared to ditching in water.
Open fields provide the safest option for forced landings, resulting in the lowest fatality and injury rates among all surfaces reviewed.
In any emergency landing, the pilot's primary focus should be on occupant survival, as the aircraft is likely to be a total loss regardless of the chosen landing surface.

See a mistake? Contact us.

If you fly long enough and often enough, sooner or later youll face the prospect of having to put an airplane on the deck in a hurry. If youre lucky, itll be due to just a sick passenger or maybe a rough engine. But it could just as well be a full-up-oil-on-the-windshield forced landing.

In the latter, youre confronted with the sudden and unavoidable question of where to put the thing down. Is a road the best choice? An open plowed field? Settling into a dense pine forest? A nice lake, near the shore?