Improved climb on 737NG
 

hi chaps
I had a discussion with a friend concerning improved climb but couldn't get to an agreement.How safe is it to do an improved climb with a stop margin of 200 meters?

How on Earth do you know the stop margin?

By computing it from the Electronic flight Bag

It is as safe as any other performance option with the same stop margin. Its main use is to clear obstacles faster and therefore allow more payload on an obstacle limited runway, so the choice is either take the payload or reduce it and do not use improved climb.

If you use it mainly to get a bigger thrust reduction it is probably even better than that as your airplane doesn't weigh as much as the case where you absolutely need to use it and therefore stop-performance is better. But that is just guessing on my side.

Anyway, i can understand a certain reluctance to use it as it is somewhat unusual at first, especially on those longer runways where one was not used to rotate close to the end.

Our EFB doesn't give the stop margin, it just shows the limiting factor, be it field, climb, obstacle or so on.

I'm always happy to improved climb as long as it doesn't give 'field' as a limit, otherwise I think you're increasing the risk for only a small benefit in thrust reduction.

If it's the only way to get airborne, then I'd still be happy to use it, but being aware of the small margins.