No doubt in my mind that we tend to fly as well as we have too and don't
realize how much more precise we can be until we have too.

Flying gliders with 50 ft wings makes a lot of runways 'interesting'.
Landed on at least one where you have to lift a wing to clear the lights
(Pocono Stoudsburg N53). The trick is to turn off between the lights before
you drop the wing. Too many roadways are unlandable because of reflectors -
especially out west in the 'wide open spaces' where it looks like you can
land anywhere but can't actually do it anywhere with 50' wings. I've landed
on a couple of roads where I had to pick a spot between roadsigns. A number
of glider ports have a 3 ft wide hard strip for TO and Landings with the
single wheel. Even pre-solo pilots do it. Easier than it seems - you fly
as well as you have too.

W88 in Greensboro has a longitidinal split of gravel and 20' asphalt. You
can land on either but it's strange to straddle it. Could be interesting at
night (lol)

I've always been impressed with military trained pilots who seem to have
been trained to do everything on the centerline. Just paying attention
makes it easy.

"Kyle Boatright" wrote in message
...
What's the narrowest runway you've ever used? At what runway width are
you
comfortable? Among other things, I had an interesting experience
yesterday
with a runway that was far narrower than any I'd used before...

We had gone to Dallas for Mother's day, and returned to Atlanta yesterday
in
my RV-6, which is set-up for basic VFR. The weather was marginal for
most
of the way, and we made two unscheduled stops and a couple of 180 degree
course reversals to avoid weather that was below my minimums. This turned
a
3.5 hour trip into an 8 hour odyssey.

Our first 180 turn and unscheduled stop occurred when the ceiling was
lower
than forecast, below my personal minimums, and dropping along our route of
flight. I hit the "nearest" function on the GPS, and retreated to the
nearest airfield to give the FSS a call on the cell phone (we were too low
for radio communication). As we overflew the airfield, I noticed that all
it was was a paved strip and a paved ramp. No buildings nearby. Also, the
strip looked fairly narrow, but I went ahead with the landing anyway.

On very short final, it became obvious that this strip redefined narrow.
Accoring to the AFD, it is 50' wide, but what the AFD didn't say is that
3'
tall sagebrush grows right to the edge of the strip, and occasionally cuts
into the 50' useful width. Given that 3' sagebrush will hit the RV-6's
wingtips, I probably had 10'-12' clear on each side. Catching the
sagebrush
with a wingtip would have almost certainly caused a groundloop.

With this in mind, and concentrating hard enough to cause permanant
forehead
wrinkles, I managed to keep the airplane centered on landing and rollout,
then taxiied (sp?) to the ramp, where I shut down, pulled out the cell
phone
and got exactly zero signal... (Sometimes you can't win.)

So, we fired up again, taxiied out, and I kept the bird out of the weeds
on
takeoff and off we went. In the 30 minutes our detour consumed, the
weather
along the route improved meaningfully, and we made another 225 miles
before
the next unplanned stop.

After a 3 hour wait and a couple of visits with the on-field FSS at
Greenville, MS, we found a safe path around the line of storms on the
Alabama/Mississippi border and came on home. One of the real advantages
to
a relatively high performance airplane is that if the weather allows, you
can get above most of the cumulus and eyeball your way around the
convective
stuff. I'm not sure we would have gotten around yesterday's weather in a
C-172 or Cherokee...