"Roger Long" wrote:
This is one of those things that makes you realize how much is sometimes
riding on toy quality components assembled in third world countries by bored
workers. If there is any doubt about your flap function at all (just being
in a post 1976 Cessna could qualify for that) aggressive slipping with 10
degrees of flaps into tight fields has a lot more to recommend it than I
thought previously.

Years ago, when I was doing my instrument training, I was on a night IFR
flight with my instructor when we had a partial electrical failure
(lights got dim, radios started getting scratchy, no transponder)
shortly after takeoff. We canceled IFR and headed back to the field.

On the way back, we discussed the fact that we might have enough power
to put the flaps down, but not enough to pick them back up if we needed
to do a go-around. We had plenty of runway, so decided to do a flapless
landing.

On downwind, my brain went into automatic mode and selected 10 degrees
of flaps without even thinking about it. I immediately realized what I
had done, and we decided to just leave the 10 flaps and land like that.
We landed uneventfully.

It amazing how you do things at an automatic level, and even when you
make a conscious decision to do something different, often times you'll
go ahead and do the usual thing anyway, without even thinking about it.
If I was in a similar situation again, I'd probably put a "INOP" sticky
on the flap handle, to remind myself not to use it. Remember the scene
in Apollo 13 where one of the astronauts taped a "NO!" sign over the
switch which fired the LEM disconnect pyros to make sure he didn't hit
it by mistake?