Back in my youthful exuberance days, I and another guy (whose name and face both now elude my memory) used to compete to see how short we could land a Cessna 150. The answer was, pretty short. We would come in hanging on the edge of a stall and stomp on the brakes the moment a wheel touched the runway. I felt as if we got stopped in a couple of hundred feet, though I never actually measured.
The 150 was a very forgiving airplane (and I suppose its successor, the 152, was too, but by the time the 152 came out training planes were behind me) and so you could fly these minimum-speed approaches, the airspeed indicator needle wobbling around in the position error zone, without much anxiety about something going wrong. Great things can be achieved in airplanes that make you feel confident. And great mistakes can be made, too.
