(in a 300 hp airplane, that is …) I would have cleared those trees in my 44 year old Warrior, and actually I do often
And I could do it in a 100 HP C150. 
It isn’t a function solely of the power. A 747 couldn’t do it. Neither could your 44 year old Warrior if it was loaded to 3650 pounds.
No, but it could at MTOM, or close to it, and that’s the only thing that counts for the pilot.
So can the Bonanza at its MTOW. The video is a prime example for lack of type specific training, not short field performance.
Exactly, and that’s what I meant. It’s shame if you can’t safely take-off under these conditions. Lack of training is a choice, isn’t it?
This is the one thing I don’t get about American pilots, the paranoia about “short fields”. The depicted runway is far from short, and it’s paved too – it’s a rather long field for the airplane involved. And I doubt this would have happened like that if the pilot didn’t have the “omg this is going to be sooo tight” attitude from the start (judging from the very first comments).
This is a runway where we can begin to speak of ‘short’ – and for a normally loaded plane up to a C172, the asphalt part of that one is sufficient most of the time:
This is the one thing I don’t get about American pilots, the paranoia about “short fields”.
Lack of practise. US GA is blessed with a lot of very long, very good, very smooth airfields. Most flight schools ban students from going to places which cannot ever be considered short (“no airfields less than 3000 feet long” or “only hard surfaced runways allowed” etc) meaning student pilots never get anything but a hypothetical simulated short field during their training. They may then go on to fly several hundred hours and never see a runway shorter than 4000 feet that’s not paved.
Just before I left the US, my syndicate partner in the Cessna 140 that we had, had just become a flight instructor. His first ever student was in our aircraft – so the whole thing was a bit atypical from the get go. The student’s first solo was out of a grass airfield – nice and wide, not really short but about half the length of most airfields in Houston. A great place for a first solo in a tailwheel aircraft; grass is more forgiving. When his student was doing his third or fourth supervised solo back at our home field (a 5000 foot long asphalt runway) another instructor was sending a student solo and the two got chatting (it’s actually on video). My friend mentioned “I sent him solo 2 days ago off the grass strip at $AIRFIELD” (I actually forget which one it was!) to which the other instructor commented “Grass strip? Are you sure that’s safe!?!?”) (complete with the interrobangs).
The other instructor (like so many) was a product of the airline training sausage factory, and probably had never gone to a grass strip himself. This is tremendously common when there are so many good airfields with 5000 foot long runways. In the US if you of course seek out a freelance instructor who does it for the love of it rather than timebuilding then you’ll probably really get to fly to short airfields, but the thing is when you’re a starting student you’re unlikely to know who the good freelance instructors are.
So there’s quite a high proportion of pilots – even ones with enough time under their belt that they’ve worked up to a Bonanza (which is a VERY capable plane for operating of rough airstrips – I used to take our club’s Bo into the Soaring Club of Houston quite frequently which is really just nothing more than a cow pasture) anything below 3000 feet is thought to be as a short field when for many single engine aircraft it should be a no-drama arrival and departure even at MTOW – because they simply have never got to experience anything genuinely short until they become an aircraft owner since most rental places won’t let you take the plane into airstrips that are less than about 5 times longer than what the manual says should be a normal takeoff roll!
In the US if you of course seek out a freelance instructor who does it for the love of it rather than time building then you’ll probably really get to fly to short airfields, but the thing is when you’re a starting student you’re unlikely to know who the good freelance instructors are.
I think that’s true, unless you look ‘outside the box’. Here’s a US video in which a Cherokee driver makes a big fuss about the airport in his introduction 
It is none-the-less fairly sporty.
I think there are two very separate issues here: short runways, and grass.
Anybody who can fly the plane “to spec” can go to a short runway. I consider myself only an average-ok pilot but I was going to 500m very early on in the TB20. Switzerland for example is full of these. The TB20 makes it easy. What is hard is doing short runways in strong crosswinds / turbulence, etc but otherwise if you can control the speed, etc, it’s easy enough. I have done the US PPL and the US CPL, doing stuff never seen on the UK scene (short field takeoffs, soft field takeoffs, lazy eights, chandelles) and don’t think US trained pilots start with fewer basic piloting skills than European ones. (In fact I think a new US pilot is much more able to fly A-B than a European pilot, but that’s much assisted by their uniform regime). In the fullness of time and with a bit of poor currency thrown in, you can find complete clowns on both sides, but European pilots are more likely to point a finger at US trained clowns than vice versa because the US based community sees almost no Europeans flying there, and because a lot of European “intellectuals” dislike the USA generally and dislike the wide use of US training by European pilots (who “should” be spending money locally) specifically
Grass is a very different thing. “We” do grass because we often have no choice. Most grass runways are grass because the owner can’t get permission to tarmac it, can’t afford the few hundred k to do so, or wants to keep a very low profile. In many cases the strip is group owned and they can’t agree on funding for a new lawn mower… If I had a choice, I would never land on grass. It makes the plane mucky, it plays havoc with runway performance (there is a huge difference between say 2" grass and say 6" grass, which can be just a week’s growth in a wet warm summer), and most importantly if there is a pothole, bang goes your prop, maybe the nosewheel, the engine need inspecting (and where will the plane sit while they do that?), etc, and it is down to your insurance. The airfield guy who told you on the phone “it’s in great condition” isn’t going to pay for it. Not unless you sue, and then he will spread the word all over the area and your name will stink for the next 10 years. How do I know? Don’t ask, but let’s just say I never tried to sue anybody; the airfield chinese-whisper and gossip circuit does the job nicely. So I can fully understand somebody avoiding grass, unless they know the runway and the taxiways very well. Or, of course, unless they rent, in which case there is no comeback (on them) So, grass is fine for local trips, done often, but one would be less likely to be flying say UK-Africa and head for a completely unknown grass runway.
If I had a grass runway I would covertly reinforce it with that green plastic mesh, immediately.
That is not my experience. Short field takeoff and landings are a required part of training in the US. When I operated a flight school we required pilots to use paved runways because the insurance required it. As a side issue, aircraft flying into and out of grass strips are much harder to keep clean. We did not specify a minimum length runway in our rental agreement. Pilots who operate tail wheel aircraft routinely operate out of short grass strips and their are many such strips in just about every county. Most are private and not for use by the public, but they certainly are numerous. I agree the Bonanza is a pretty good short and rough field airplane and I have visited many in the US and Mexico. I would have no problem operating out of a 1500 foot strip with my Bonanza and rarely have a landing or takeoff roll more than 1000 feet. However, as pilots get along in years from their training, many don’t maintain or practice the skills needed to maintain proficiency and as they check out in faster and more advance aircraft, they don’t always explore this aspect of their operation. On the other hand, there are a lot of pilots who keep their aircraft at a grass strip and keep up the skills. So, I suspect that it all depends on what kind of routine flying one does and what kind of airports one operates out of and not so much on the nationality of the pilot.
Here is a Bonanza pilot who knows what he is doing. This is at Schafer Meadows, Monana, a US Fire Service grass strip at 4856 MSL, runway length 3200 feet, during the summer in July when it is warm.
Bonanza landing at Schafer Montana
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