Short and Soft-Field Takeoffs

Short-field landings are all about using excellent technique to get your airplane into a tight spot. That same technique, however, can put you in an even tighter spot when it’s time to leave.

Mike Hart

Friday, February 21, 2014 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Short-field takeoffs often require significantly more runway than landings, especially with increasing altitude and temperature, and are associated with a much higher fatality rate due to common stall/spin accidents.
Most short-field takeoff accidents are preventable through diligent pre-flight planning, which includes meticulously calculating aircraft performance using the POH and accounting for all variables like weight, wind, temperature, altitude, runway slope, and surface conditions.
Pilots must adhere strictly to correct POH techniques, utilize ground effect for acceleration, establish an abort point, and critically, avoid the fatal mistake of pulling up to clear obstacles with insufficient performance, as a controlled forward impact is almost always safer than a stall/spin.

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Short-field landings are all about using excellent technique to get your airplane into a tight spot. That same technique, however, can put you in an even tighter spot when it’s time to leave.

Most general aviation aircraft land shorter than they leave. This performance disparity can be subtle at sea level, where the two numbers might be equal. As altitude and temperature increase, however, the gulf between them grows and it often can take twice as much runway to depart than it does to land. Airspeed control gets you into a short field, but horsepower is what gets you out, and available horsepower drops as altitude increases.