Working low down in the terrain of mountains or down amongst obstructions requires slow airspeed for those commited to level turns. We have to be able to get a radius and rate of turn sufficient to miss horizontally terrain or obstructions. The slower we go, the faster our rate of turn. The slower we go, the shorter the radius of the turn.

A huge advantage, utalized in air to ground gunnery, crop dusting, and pipeline patrol work, is the energy management turn. Why? Because it allows cruise airspeed kinetic energy initially to zoom up to higher altitude wings level and thus slows the aircraft allowing shorter radius and faster rate of turn. Bonus! The added safety feature, in addition to the energy efficiency, is that by allowing the nose to go down naturally in the turn we are able to keep g loading to 1g,.

The problem that makes the energy management turn not the default for all non-instrument turns, all contact turns, is that we have to active fly the airplane. We have to be ahead of the airplane constantly. In order to be zoomed up and slow enough to bank aggressively as needed, we have to anticipate the need to turn. And like most skills, making shallow to medium banked energy management turns is harder to learn than the aggressively crop duster ones.

While life saving, the energy management turn is also life changing. It doesn't work as an emergency fix. If we wait until we need to turn aggressively, we will rack up gs in a level, high airspeed turn. We will hit the terrain or obstructions, or we will stall.

To be life saving, in an emergency, the energy management turn must be the default contact turn. To be default, it must be the way we turn. No problem going IMC or even just IFR. It is obviously a different world. Slow control pressure and rapid cross check will snap back into place.

Integration of instrument with low contact flying is a fool's errand and dangerous.

I missed one of the advantages of the energy management turn. In the turn portion, after we have zoomed up wings level, the nose is down. With the nose down either slip or skid is safely possible. If we're not coming around fast enough to miss the obstruction and we are now low enough to hook a wing on wires or terrain, we can use rudder to put the nose exactly where we want it quickly. We can skid. We can push the nose around in time to not even be worried.

We can also just bank enough to miss, let the nose go down naturally, and skid as necessary. The problems here are airspeed and altitude. Too much of the former, not enough of the latter. It takes time to extinguish old muscle memory and develop new muscle memory, and it is different to anticipate the need to turn well before arriving at the turn point. The zoom up is wings level. If we were to turn in the zoom up, we would create load factor.

The dump the nose, in the video, to unload the wing is because we stall far more often in a high pitch attitude during takeoff and climb out. Crop dusters don't even imagine pitching up without zoom reserve. We could mark zoom reserve airspeed on the indicator, but it is more accurately a thing we feel in our butt.