Semantics -- I always considered a forced landing as one where you pick a farmer's field or an empty road and put the plane down safely and walk away, with the plane resting on its landing gear but not on a runway. Some place much like the field the acft in this thread tried to take-off from. Landing an acft on a runway has often resulted in a crash (oops, missed it by that much).

Your thread was about choosing between a lake, river or tree tops for your forced landing, with a very high likelihood (IMO) of your Cessna 182 coming to rest much like the aircraft in this thread's video. Not on its gear and not in flyable condition.

It's a forced landing right up until your wing or prop makes contact with the first tree or sinks in 10 feet of water near shore (or not). The wording on your NTSB report will look much like this one in Guatemala with the words, "crashed during a forced landing" evident. Potato tomato If your forced landing results in the acft never flying again, that's a crash.

FWIW, $.02

I guess I misunderstood the point you were making in post no.2, after all. Could you spell it out for me please?

Nope, between the two threads I've already said enough. The video speaks much louder than I ever could.

Yoke mounted clipboard.

I didn't see any evidence of an "air pocket" but I did notice that the pilot had pulled the yoke pretty far back. I'm not sure if that aggravated the situation or if he knew that they were going in and wanted to bleed off some energy. Doing so either put them in the trees or kept them alive.

A commercial pilot flying Part 91 means that the pax were probably friends or family.

Comments from the pilot himself:

http://m.aopa.org/training/articles/2012/120814youtube-crash-pilot-was-going-to-abort.html


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That would a reasonable thing, perhaps even a good sign. Lots of data for pilots comes that way these days - more easily updated than paper - and tools for (mis)calculating various things like weight limits and density...

He does mention a miscalculation. He's probably taken off enough in that plane to believe he understands its actual performance vs calculated numbers, and with a long runway he was probably thinking it ought to work and there's plenty of runway left to try a little more...

He probably doesn't get a trouble on a short runway because he'd abort quickly. That longer runway seduced him into eating into margin.

Even if the correct performance data showed he was good to go, in the AOPA article, they point out that the video shows he had left the mixture control in the full rich position. That's a HUGE error that at a density altitude of somewhere around 7 to 9 thousand feet would lose him a BIG BIG chunk of available power.