Every student who has spent more than 20 hours flying an airplane has received some instruction in short- and soft-field landings. It's part of the private pilot tradition, as well as a required training subject. Of course, few instructors—and even fewer of their students—have ever actually landed on a runway either shorter than 1,500 feet, or with six inches of snow, mud, or water standing on it.

The soft/short-field thing is a training exercise that's fun to do—and it will pay off if the skills are ever needed in a real-life situation.  The difference between practice and real in the short/soft-field game is that in the real world there is something at stake other than the disappointment of rolling past a specific runway light, or not turning off before passing a designated intersection.

When it's actually a short or soft field, the ante is pretty high—you're putting your airplane and maybe your neck on the line.  For that reason, we're going to develop some guidelines that can be used to get you in and out with a minimum of hassle and risk. They'll work in the sort-of-short/soft-field situations that we're likely to see.

This trip takes us into the Alaskan Interior: landing and taking off from some of the shorter fields up here. Note Some airports are defaults but others are RTMM fields so you will require the RTMM scenery to be able to see these strips.

A few of these strips are a real challenge especially in the designated aircraft for this excursion: The Basler BT67, Douglas DC-3 or the Douglas C-47 Skytrain.

Low and slow for scenic viewing still applies but some of the landings are extremely difficult in this aircraft. Find the ideal approach to be able to safely land.

A tour download for this excursion is available in the Tour downloads section which contains the all the tour details, sky vector map links as well as the award for completion. Make sure you obtain the tour download for all of the tour specifics.