Short takeoff and landing. STOL. It was once just a way to describe a mod kit that put drooped wingtips and stall fences on a high-wing Cessna or Maule, lowering the stall speed in order to help a stock single-engine airplane get in and out of cool airstrips in the backcountry. Or, perhaps, it simply described the techniques needed to make the technical approaches into those hard to-reach strips. But the term took on a whole new meaning when fat bush wheels and hopped-up engines got involved, enticing pilots to try their skill with shorter and tighter landing spots.
Some of those strips look just like that—spots on the chart. Many of them lie within the mountains, in wilderness areas. But others are carved out of corn fields in the Midwest, or lakeside meadows on the East Coast.
