Ron Garret wrote:
If you fly final with some amount of power (which I gather most
people
do -- I always have) that seems to guarantee that if you lose your
engine on final you will land short, and there's pretty much nothing
you
can do about it. Is that true?

More or less. In some cases you can play tricks with retracting
gear/flaps, but usually it's not worth it.

The important question is this - other than running out of gas, what
would cause you to go from not having any engine problems at all, to
not having enough power to maintain a 3 degree glideslope (surely you
don't fly any flatter than that?) in the time it takes to fly a pattern
at the reduced power setting used in the pattern? Honestly, I can't
think of anything. And of course if you have engine problems or aren't
sure about having enough fuel, you will, I assume, fly a power-off
pattern and commit to land.

Many instructors teach power-off patterns (idle abeam the numbers). I
teach it too, but not as a normal procedure. It's simply not practical
most of the time (due to traffic). Of course if I were teaching in the
average rental (and teaching people who were going to be flying typical
rentals) I might feel differently.

Michael