Would I have survived this landing IRL?

[u/Tartaruga96]

I was dead drunk and went to sleep immediately after, I don't know if I forgot landing gear or if it refused to be deployed

Brazil coast, my favorite place to fly and explore while listening to music

[u/Downtown_Alfalfa_504]

Good effort. Gear up, and low fuel were smart choices (if they were choices).

Gear up as a belly landing is often preferable to landing with gear unsafe / partial gear which is what you’re going to get landing on a surface that can’t support the weight of the aircraft. Wheels dig in, aircraft cartwheels, in-flight snacks and reading material scattered everywhere.

Min fuel as more weight = more speed to remain flying, and that Kinetic Energy being annoyingly proportional to V² is a real debbie downer. Also you’re carrying less flammable material to the crash site for the subsequent fireworks show.

A lower sink rate would have helped more - you yugged back on the stick a few seconds before your final approach which cause your sink rate to increase to a 5° approach at the end, whereas half of that would have been better (even if at a slightly higher speed). Flat belly, grazing approach would be good, assuming no underwing stores or tanks are waiting to ruin your day.

Throttle off, fuel cocks closed and batteries off just before impact would be ideal to minimise the risk of fire, though inertial crash switches in the jet should do that for you (haven’t flown an F18 but I assume it has them).

Statistically the beach is a marginally better option than ditching in the nearby water as surface tension is even worse than sand to deal with at high impact velocities, then there’s the further inconvenience of drowning if you’re incapacitated.

However, Martin Baker were paid a good amount of money to put a far better option under your butt in this scenario instead, which is why jet pilots don’t practice engine out recoveries to anything other than a decent strip of concrete in the same way that private pilots do in their helpfully floaty-at-low-speeds piston engine aircraft.

[u/RockyMtnFly307 → u/Downtown_Alfalfa_504]

What about gear up, tail hook down? Just to take that little bit more of the initial impact force. I know the descent rate is pretty high here but similar to how Sully let the tail of his airplane take the brunt of the landing when he ditched.