I’ve been flying professionally for a while now, and I’ve done a few different types of flying work - and had more than my share of emergencies. The highest incidence of mechanical surprises happened while I was instructing. Since I was teaching, and later running the flight school at a maker of aircraft with a high incidence of mechanical failures, I got more experience in the “emergency mindset” than most pilots with similar number of hours as pilot-in-command. Since I’m a helicopter pilot, not a fixed-wing driver, you may not feel that my opinion is qualified. Up to you.
In my work as a pilot/reporter for a television and radio news station, I’ve seen the aftermath of some airplane surprises, and I’ve been impressed with the skill-under-stress shown by those pilots - generally because it’s probably their first unsimulated emergency.
And there’s a couple of factors here that haven’t been given the emphasis they deserve.
In the first place, Hilander10 said:
This is simply not true. FAA regulations grant the pilot-in-command the ability to disobey any ATC (traffic control) instruction to the extent necessary to meet the emergency.
YOU, as pilot, are expected, privileged, and required to use your best judgment in the situation. If Approach tells you to set down on the freeway, you can say “No, there’s people down there - I’m heading for the _____.” And they will not kick at all - provided you were right. Note: this doesn’t give you the right to blow them off for the rest of the day - just to the extent necessary to meet the emergency.
Next off, msmith537 points out that:
This is a bigger factor than most people realize. In the dark, you may hazard a guess about what those dark spots are, but you can’t know. When I’m flying cross-country at night, I add an extra thousand feet or so, just because of this.
She probably would have gone for the clearing - but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t know it wasn’t strung solidly with wires. She didn’t like the freeway, but she COULD SEE IT.
I will guess about her decision to land “clean” (flaps and gear up). It reduced drag on the airplane, allowing her better control, because airfoils work better with more air. Personally, I’d question this decision, but not too hard, because of another factor that nobody’s mentioned:
She was flying bank paper. Why does that matter? Because bank-paper-flying is one of the scut-work jobs that only low-time pilots do, and then only long enough to move up the ladder to the better jobs. So the fact that she was flying checks tells me that she didn’t have much experience. With more experience she might have decided that she DIDN’T want all that speed when she got to the ground, and she DID want some wheels for directional control when she got there. Maybe she would have dumped flaps and throttled back - remember she was afraid she’d drop the engine.
This is a big thing to fear. You may not be aware of it, but a dropped engine is more than an inconvenience to the ground - it places your airplane WAY out-of-balance. It won’t fly that way. It has as much control as a dropped piece of paper.
So she was rattled, but she evaluated the options and chose the best one available. With more experience, maybe she’d have been going slower, and had some wheels out, when she got down. But I think she did pretty well.
Liability? The insurer of the company she was flying for will probably pay, but I don’t think any will stick to her - other than the nightmare of an NTSB investigation, and a fatal accident on her record.