Worked on both short and soft field takeoff and landing today. I had worked on the soft field takeoffs last time up, and did one more today. Not too difficult – keep the nose off the ground, release back pressure on the yoke as necessary to avoid driving the tail into the ground, takeoff ASAP, get in ground effect, speed up to normal climb speed and off you go. Short field takeoffs are entertaining – the plane is held on the ground for a bit longer than usual (about 5 knots more in the 150), and V_x is used for climb speed. Nothing difficult at all, but just have to remember what is going on.

Short field landings are almost the exact opposite of soft field landings. Rather than coming in flat, the approach is steep, with max allowed landing flap and (hopefully) power. The idea is to clear the obstacle and get on the runway with power, so that the power can be removed, limiting the “float” down the runway. The contact with the runway should be a bit of a “thumper” — strong enough that the plane can immediately be slowed down with the brakes.

Anyway, neither the soft nor short field landings were as smooth as I would have liked. I was coming into the turn to final too high, which meant I was short on power to remove for the short field landing. This should be easily correctable with some more practice on approaches in general. The soft field landings, I was hitting the approach ok, but wasn’t applying power when I was shallowing out, so I was getting too slow, and that was going nowhere good. More things to work on for Monday…