In article O4l6d.38447$He1.940@attbi_s01,
"Bill Daniels" wrote:

By example, I was surprised at the reaction I got recently when I said that
to be safe on a cross country, you must always be with gliding distance of a
known-safe landing site. And that site should be reachable at half your
best glide. The reaction could be summed up as, "Then nobody would go cross
country". That startled me.

Depends on where you're flying.

Here in NZ we have a variety of conditions.

At Omarama you don't even think of flying cross country unless you have
all the topdressing airstrips in your GPS (and on your map, though there
are plenty you'll never see if you try to find them using a map).

Here in the North Island there's a lot of dairy farming. There are so
many paddocks (with an average size of about two football fields) that
are safe to land in that you don't need to know in advance which *one*
you'd use if you had to ... it's enough to know that you're within glide
range (at half best L/D if you want though we seldom get that sort of
sink) of a farmed area. If one paddock doesn't look good then there are
a dozen others right next to it.

-- Bruce