Flaps and V-Tails of Death

Michael wrote:

Robert Ehrlich wrote
Except for the presence of the runway instead of unlandable terrain below
the glider, this is exactly the situation of my question, and so the answer,
as I suspected, is that you are out of options.

I think that's rather overstated. Unless you have botched the pattern
so throroughly that you are at 30 degrees of flap and coming up short,
you do exactly what you do in a spoiler-only ship - you retract the
flaps. The difference is this - you can't just retract completely, as
you would spoilers, because retracting that last 30 degrees is going
to cause a transient drop you won't like. However, going from 90
degrees to 45 causes no loss of lift at all, and a huge loss of drag -
thus causing airspeed to increase, which allows lifting the nose and
dramatically flattening the approach. This was certainly the case in
my HP-11, and I can't imagine it would be much different on other
flaps-only gliders.

This will work on approach, when you have the nose down attitude
corresponding to the flaps setting but not in the situation of my
initial question, i.e. just after a botched flare, a few feet above
the runnway and no nose down attitude. In this case retracting the
flaps will cause a loss of drag, but no so huge, i.e. the drag will
much more than in zero flaps or zero spoilers configuration and there
is no gain in lift and no change in the stall speed, you don't have
the altitude that you can convert into speed, so I think that you are
going to fall on the ground, with a slighly increased delay compared
to what would happen if you didn't retract some flaps.