Of course it requires high skills to win the short landing completion in the Alaska Super Cub contests, and occasionally someone will exceed the limits and smack the prop on the ground or flip the airplane....
.....however the shortest landings are done with the wheel landing and load the tires and heavy braking...
.....so in my simple mind I have concluded that wheel landings do beat three point landings when spot..short landing.
Back to bigger tail wheel airplanes.
During my DC3 days a very large percentage of our flying was off airport operations on various surfaces such as snow/ice....sand beaches in the high Arctic and oil well service truck roads built in the wilderness and accurate touch downs and short landings often were required.
I experimented very carefully with the DC3 to see how best to perform these landings.
My findings were on snow/ice with wheel skis a tail low wheel landing worked best.
On pavement or hard surfaces such as hard packed gravel roads the wheel landing with max safe braking gave the shortest landings.
The problem with the three point landing was accurate touch down on a given point was more difficult than doing the wheel landing due to the difficulty of judging float before the three point touch down.....every second of excess float really eats up distance.
I am aware that many here may not agree with my personal methods with the DC3 but for me it worked best and I never lost control or landed short or ran off the side of the landing path or off the end in five thousand hours of flying the DC3.
Bottom line is each pilot should fly the way that works best for them and if you don't wreck the airplane then your method is best for you.
There I am finished and hope we all can agree on my last sentence.
