Ibra wrote:
I think DA40 poh/afm has a very prescriptive approach and threshold speeds on various weights, on everything else you would just say 1.3*VS0 which is roughly in the 70kts-80kts for most touring SEP but some can fly slower than that, I would go with 80kts on final and 70kts on 50ft over threshold (don’t know my touch down speed but it should be the slowest aircraft can have on a given day )
Peter wrote:
I would think it is almost impossible to do ab initio PPL training at Wangen-Lachen (~450m) – in any “normal” GA training plane. Well, not without selecting the candidates for aptitude.
If I am not totally mistaken the club there does exactly that. Same in Triengen, same in Beromünster and other such places, not to mention Bad Ragaz, which is challenging also in topography but which used to be the base of the local Mooney distributor. 495*12 m runway
I flew to Wangen Lachen during my PPL training both with FI and without him on my solo cross country.
172driver wrote:
What does the US have to do with this ?
That is where I got the wide eyed comments from when mentioning that we are taking the Mooney regularly into places like that, not to mention that there are several based there including a M22 Mustang. In Europe most pilots know and are trained on small runways, they don´t seem to exist in the US due to much more space available.
I would think it is almost impossible to do ab initio PPL training at Wangen-Lachen (~450m) – in any “normal” GA training plane
No worries, Wangen-Lachen has a pretty long runway of 500m instead of the 450m you mentioned 
Next of C152 and PA28 there are also based a lot of Mooneys… Worth a visit, btw….
Snoopy wrote:
Why is it necessary to condescend? Towards „us pilots“ or „career pilots“?
Because we are Euro – GA pilots and they are not ?
There are several reasons for going faster than necessary. One being to speed up the circuits at crowded airports. There is no “one way” to land a GA aircraft anyway. I mean, there are procedures and there are stick and rudder skills.
Worth a visit, btw….
Been there Remember the Mooneys in the hangars. My comment was concerning PPL training. They way it is done in the UK would not work there.
You are right; it is 500m. I recall 450m from another airport diagram for LSPV.
No need to be condescending towards US pilots. They have fantastic freedoms which Europe can only dream about.
Why would PPL training “like in the UK” be a problem on a short runway ?
What is the UK way like ?
EDMJ Jesenwang with 408m x 12m has been doing ab initio training for decades…
C152, C172 (and MEP in a P2006)
Once done, you have no irrational fear of short runways (and are used to doing the maths around density altitude)
No need to be condescending towards US pilots. They have fantastic freedoms which Europe can only dream about.
No way I meant it to be condescending. It simply does not happen there because they hardly have any short runways. In Europe, we need to shoehorn airports into small pieces of real estate which is one reason we get so many with very short runways. When we were discussing short strips on Mooneyspace from time to time, for them mostly a short strip is anything less than 3000 ft. I regularly post pics of Wangen Lachen in there. For most Mooneys, 500 m are ample enough.
Personally however, I love the idea of doing your ppl on one of those. I did mine in Altenrhein but we operated out of the grass runway there a lot which is 600 m long, but in any case, we operated in and out of all the small airfields during the PPL. Also now, we do a short field intro with every pilot who comes to fly on the Mooney, mostly Wangen Lachen or Bad Ragaz. Me, I´ve been with the Mooney to several such places, Triengen, Wangen Lachen come to mind as well as Speck where we go regularly for maintenance and which with the displaced threshold is not much longer. I find it perfect training.
Actually it also helps for places like Zurich where we aim to land on the first 500m of Runway 28 to minimize runway occupancy time and let the big boys use taxiway J for crossing as fast as we can.
Short fields demand good speed control and makes you really want to nail that touch down point every time. Once you get used to that, it becomes second nature. Apart from that, being able to put your plane in short fields also make your chance of landing it in one piece in case of an outfield landing quite a lot more realistic.
I watched the video with sound off at the breakfast table. Apart from the speed, which was already discussed, I got the impression that there was insufficient flare at some landings.
If this was during instruction then firstly it is okay, everyone can do a bad landing during instruction. My first solo landing (with my wife watching from the ground, to make matters worse) was a terrible bouncy landing that would have resulted in a crash if I hadn’t applied full power and aborted the landing.
During PPL training I was also taught to fly relatively fast approaches at 70 kts (the Aquila’s Vs0 is 45 its, so 1.3 Vs0 would be roughly 60 kts. I always thought this was to offset the risk of strong gusts, which were not unusual at my coastal homebase. I only later realised this may make the landings more difficult, but the habit is so ingrained that I have a hard time landing slower. I also never landed on a runway shorter than 750 m.
The question is: Are more accidents caused by planes flying too slow or too fast? :)
Mooney_Driver wrote:
For most Mooneys, 500 m are ample enough.
I wouldn’t fancy 500 m in my J unless I could come in very flat and aim to touch down at the very start of the tarmac. Even 5 kts above target speed and 500 m goes by very quickly. 600 m is the shortest I’ve tried so far.
