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Short Field Takeoffs
How not to kill yourself
Short field takeoffs are about lifting off as soon as possible, but they are not about immediately pulling the nose up to climb as steeply as possible. I cringe when I see pilots doing this unnecessarily on YouTube videos and in real life, because it simply is not safe. If obstacles require such a steep departure, you should probably ask yourself how badly you want to land there. (There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.)
While it is true that some highly powered light weight taildraggers can climb straight out of ground effect in a really nose-high attitude, doing so is asking for trouble. If the engine falters, the pilot may find that his trusty steed is already below power off stall speed. At the very least he will find airspeed rapidly decaying and will have to very quickly push the stick forward pretty hard to get the nose down in time to avoid the stall.
Whether it stalls or not, in this situation the airplane is going to lose a lot of altitude before it can round-out for a landing. Chances are, the airplane will not be high enough or fast enough to allow recovery and will crash.
The proper technique is to instantly get the nose down while the airplane is still no more than a couple of feet agl and to keep it there and let the airplane accelerate in ground effect until it reaches a safe climb speed. A safe climb speed is a speed at which the airplane can be safely landed if it suddenly loses power.
At very low altitude, the minimum safe climb speed is certainly above best angle of climb speed, and may even be above best rate of climb speed. You can check it out in your airplane by cutting power in a steep climb at altitude and measuring how much altitude you lose before you can level off without stalling. Naturally, the higher you are, the lower the minimum safe climb speed can be, because the altitude gives you more time to accelerate under gravity to your power off flare speed before making your emergency landing.
The bottom line is that as airspeed builds, it gives you the ability to trade some of that speed for altitude, or at least for a lower rate of descent, such as during a round out just before touchdown. But until you have enough speed to make that trade, you should stay very close to the ground so the impact will not be too hard if power is suddenly lost.
