Mortimer Schnerd, RN wrote:

My first chief pilot insisted on making every landing a short field landing.
That way, when I really had to stuff one in, it was just a normal day at the
office. I always flew a steep power off approach in Cessnas (except the twins).
And screw the manufacturer's numbers... they're really just a guide to one
aspect of handling the aircraft. There's generally more than one way to
accomplish the same.

Your chief pilot sounds like my primary instructor. Pretty much every
landing was virtually a short-field landing. Well, not really as his
technique for a short-field landing scares me to this day, even though I
was once proficient at it in the 150. We came in with power on, the
nose in the air and the stall horn occasionally making a weak bleat.
Then once over the threshold, cut the power to idle, drop the nose just
a second to get near the ground, then haul back into a serious flare.
The idea was to get the elevator full aft with full stall horn prior to
touchdown. Your timing had to be pretty good to avoid a bounce, but
executed correctly this resulted in an impressively short landing.

When I was learning at N38, prior to the airport expansion, they had
something like 1900' of pavement and about 400' of grass on either end
of the runway, one end terminating in tall trees. We practiced this
mostly on runway 27 (now 28) which had a fairly clear approach. We used
the road at the end of 400' overrun as the threshold and if executed
properly, you could be down and stopped before reaching the paved
portion of the runway (this in a C-150). I was never completely
comfortable flying behind the power curve like that, but if you REALLY
had to land short, that seemed to be the way to do it and Dick was
completely comfortably flying that way and teaching that. Then again,
I've never flown with any instructor since who knew the envelope of the
airplane and of his own skill with the precision that Dick did.

Matt