Today was the day we finally got to practice Soft landing and redo some short field take off.

But I got a big surprise! I thought we would go to a lush green grassy runway! Instead? We stayed at our local airport!?! What? We will practice soft field landing on an asphalt runway? Does Bentonville Municipal Airport qualifies as a soft field or short field? Of course not!

I guess, thinking about it, it does make sense. Learning should be progressive, introducing as little new parameters as possible! After all, the techniques for a soft field are working on a regular hard runway so why not training there and not suffering from some of the limitations that the soft field will offer…

Soft field? How soft exactly…

So what qualify as a soft field? Well I’m not sure but I have my own definition that I would use. I guess for sure grass runways are qualifying and the vast majority of soft fields are grass. The other one that I can think about immediately is sand. I think anything that left outside that can become soft would qualify. So if you have earthy, soil based runway like the one you can see in movies with plane landing in Africa, that should qualify as a soft field too.

What should we expect on soft fields?

• Plane might sink under its own weight in the surface!
• As you gain speed, the front wheel might be pushed down the surface and slow down the plane significantly.
• Surface is not as smooth as a concrete or asphalt runway so we might end up being a little more shaken up while on the ground.

Consequences:

• If the plane has “sinked” in the ground, you will need a lot of power to get it out.
• Once the plane start moving, we should try to not stop it anymore.
• On take off, you want to be as light on the front wheel as you can.
• On landing, you want to put the front wheel on the ground at the very last moment possible.

Ok the not stopping is easy, that means more anticipation and preparation as you are getting to the runway to get ready for the take off. Like making the announcement, being careful about the power setting and making sure that the transponder has been set properly. Same thing for the take off lights…

For the take off, we want to be airborne as soon as possible and being as light on the front wheel as soon as possible. This is achieved by pulling the yoke completely towards you before putting full gas. As the plane is gaining speed, the plane will start to take off before it has enough speed to really complete the takeoff. In other words, you will be out of the ground into the ground effect and stuck there until you gain more speed. This is why, the next step is to lower the nose and continue flying over the runway until you have accumulated enough speed to get out of the ground effect. Then a normal climb can be initiated.

For the landing, there is no difference in the approach, in the round off or the flare but as soon as the plane as touched the ground, we should pull on the yoke to try to keep the nose high for as long as possible. Once the plane has lost enough speed, the nose will dive to the ground anyway! The other thing to do during the landing is before touching the ground during the flare is to add just a little power. The idea here is to reduce the  vertical speed and come touching the runway as lightly as possible.

Let’s go practice on a real short field

After a few landings and takeoff, we got to go to the Crystal Lake airport (ICAO Code : 5M5). I like this airport because it is has a fairly nice scenery and the approach is a little special in the sense that the trees are fairly close and just before the threshold of the runway is a lake. This is a little more tricky to get there because we have to fly right through the approach of the main airport of the area: the Northwestern Arkansas Airport or XNA. So communication with Razorback Approach is an absolute and they might divert us to make sure that the separation is maintained. And today was no exception, we had an order from ATC to stay above 3500 feet because a plane was on final as we were flying across the runways. It is always an interesting sight to have other airplanes crossing your path.

Crystal Lake, here we come!

Because Crystal Lake is in the middle of the forest and has not a lot of traffic, we should expect to have some wildlife on the runway.

As such, before landing, it is recommended to do a low pass over the airport. Just to visually check that there are no animals on the runway and to scare them in case some would be around… Not nice for the animals but better than hitting a running propeller…

Michael usually like to do these low approach so he took the command and I took the camera. Of course, he couldn’t resist but to pull the plane in a steep climb at the runway and then handing me the plane…

You might wondering how steep was the climb! No? I will tell you anyway. The airport is officially at 1180’. 45 seconds into the video, we reached the end of the runway and started to pull up. At that point, the altitude was no more than 10 feet above the ground… 49 seconds into the video or 4 seconds later, the altimeter registers close 1400 feet. So we climbed at 50 feet per second. That’s quite something…

So after this little “stunt”, we went back to our routine for the training, going through the pattern, announcing our position as we are on a non controlled airport…

We practiced short field take off and landings, practice some of the soft field landing techniques. Everything went fine and we cam back to Bentonville. It was a nice and standard flight! It was nice to try to forget that catastrophy of a flight to Fort Smith the day before. Michael is hinting that we might actually go practice real soft field landing tomorrow to Turkey Mountain. I know this airport is not too close from us so I will have to see if I can prepare a flight plan!

CPC #13 is actually complete and it’s all about soft field landings. So I would have completed it despite not having landed on a soft field! Interesting but I guess the technique is more important that the field itself.