2. It's amazing how much power it can take in some planes to arrest a sink when landing from a minimum controllable airspeed approach. You can get a sense of what's needed for your plane waiting until you are in the flare, then feeding in power to keep her just off the runway. Be sure and practice this over a long runway.

The BIG variable to this one is density altitude. At sea level on a cold day you find yourself sinking through ground effect, a little dab of throttle is very often the only thing needed to round out, slow down even more, then touch wheels how you want them touched.

On the other hand, 100 degrees F with a DA pushing 10K, you are sliding down short final ready to round out to flare, and "Holy Shit" WTFO!!!!! You are on an instant express elevator down with NO airspeed, and the throttle is the only option you have to keep from knocking parts off the bottom of your airplane.

That shit separates the men from the boys, and is where you need that seat of the pants alive and fine tuned to be able to go play there safely.

Again, like Russ says, it's practice, practice, practice, and work into it one layer at a time.

Gump

I think we all have the same thread here, Safety and Practice. if we can get that ingrained in new pilots or new to the "backcountry airplane" pilots we can avoid the evening news, Joe Public's view that private flying is dangerous and should be stopped and of course more attention from the regulators which leads to more regulations to shut us down.

I agree with Barnstormer, especially about the very distracting airspeed indicator. Ag instructors don't try to just wean pilots off this dangerous crutch, we try to get them to use the much more useful information in the visual, aural, and kinetic environment.