Do Piks HPs and 1-35 flaps create too
much drag to leave out in the flair?

I owned an HP-11 for over a dozen year, and I own an HP-18 now. I love
large-span flaps for glidepath control, and I dearly wish I could
market sailplanes with them. Unfortunately, there are few 2-seaters to
train pilots on them with, and much in the way of rumor and
disinformation about them.

Feed-forward is the key to using large-span flaps for glidepath
control. As you crank in the flaps, you have to simultaneously apply
nose-down pitch. You can refine the pitch input as you go, but you have
to start both the flap and pitch inputs at the same time. If you try to
do it reactively, that is add some flaps and then adjust the pitch when
you detect the airspeed change, you quickly end up way behind the
curve.

In the HP-11, I would often crank on the last bit of flap in the flare
in order to achieve touchdown at the lowest possible energy level. It
takes practice, but once you develop the techniques it becomes easy.

Bob K.
http://www.hpaircraft.com