Quote Originally Posted by happiestflying View Post
Curious to see if, five years after posting this thread, you ever learned to fly, and if so, did you do it in a Speedster?

Bought a Speedster last summer in Colorado, and then flew it home a few weeks later. It's a wonderful bird, high performance, great looking. I was also curious about the STOL capabilities. Everybody doing back-country flying seems to want as much wing area as they can manage, which makes sense. The Speedster wing, at 28' or so versus 32' or so, would have, by rough calculation, about 12% less surface area, or higher wing loading.

I'm a relatively low time pilot (650 hrs) and I'm quite sure I'm not flying it as well as it can be flown, or as well as it deserves, but I'm working on getting steep and slow approaches with a power-assisted flare at the last moment. If I could add the power and also slam in some flaperons at the same time I would, but I have only one right hand, so I choose power. The steep approach should allow the least forward motion, and therefore a shorter landing roll.

Without getting into it too much, that's also the moment for some significant braking, which always raises the prop-strike risk, so I'm VERY careful about just how much brake I apply.

Having said all this, I've probably landed it safely in about 500-600' on concrete with the normal 90-80-70-60-over the numbers indicated airspeed kind of approach and no braking until late in the rollout. That's not impressive, and certainly is not back-country sandbar kind of performance, but still, it's a pretty quick stop.

I'm waiting on a fellow Kitfox guy nearby who has a VERY clever angle of attack indicator he made for his, which I'm hoping to duplicate. Once that's on my airplane, then I'm going to get serious about the steep and slow approach concept. Plus of course there's my mandatory re-reading of "Stick and Rudder".

Anyway, if you're still a member, I'd love to find out what happened in your flight training in a Speedster.
It's been five years already? No I never did learn to fly mostly because the nearest training facility is 200 miles away and now at 57 years of age I am thinking my dream might only be a dream.