Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Short field, soft field...

Today was spent practicing short field landings, short field takeoffs & soft field landings. Those things are kinda interesting on a windy day.

A short field landing requires you to get the aircraft configured so that it flies along at 60 knots. Then, instead of aiming for the runway numbers, you aim for something before the runway. My target today was a fence about 10 yards before the runway started.

Once I reached the fence, I let the aircraft settle into the ground effect and kept it in the air until it reached the runway. Then I let it settle onto the runway and hit the brakes.

Then I turned around, taxied back the beginning of the runway and set about doing a short field takeoff.

This is were you apply about 40° of flaps, sit on the brakes and go to full power. Once the aircraft is at full RPMs, release the brakes and let it go. As it begins to roll, pull back on the yoke and as soon as the aircraft leaves the ground, level it out and let it build up speed.

As soft field landing is interesting in that the goal is to hold the front wheel off the ground for as long as possible. This is the landing you would use on a soft field like grass or snow. It prevents the front wheel from digging into the ground and flipping the aircraft tail over nose.

That would be bad.


The Red Sox are in trouble so I need to pay attention to them.

You can visit these links while I do that:

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