"Kyle Boatright" wrote in message
...
What's the narrowest runway you've ever used? At what runway width are
you comfortable?

Well, let's see. There are several 30' and under wide runways in the Puget
Sound area, almost all of which I use on a semi-regular basis, and have
landed on at least once. The narrowest is 24'. It doesn't seem
uncomfortable to me at all. I may have even landed on narrower somewhere,
but if so I don't recall.

In my seaplane, probably the landings with the least margin for lateral
error have been in canals in Florida. I don't actually know how wide they
are, but if you stay in the center, you're fine. As with the runway you
describe, it's not so much the width of the landing surface, as it is the
width of the area the wings must clear. My plane has a 40' wingspan, so the
canals must be wider than that.

In any case, 10' on each side sounds like a LOT of room to me. However, I
will readily grant that comfort depends a lot on pilot experience and
confidence. Even so, I'll point out that when my primary instructor got fed
up with me landing all over the place on Boeing Field's 200' wide runway, he
fixed that by taking me over to Port Orchard with their 28' wide runway and
demonstrating that, when necessary, I had no trouble staying on the
centerline. I was no longer permitted to claim "but it's too hard" back at
Boeing.

Pete