I was stationed at a base or two that had some Caribous. Pretty cool plane to watch. Takeoff roll very short too.
At ASA (regional airline) we had 5 DH-7s, 50 passenger turboprop w/ 4 engines, and those pilots pretty much never used full flaps for landing. If they did, that thing came in steep and slow, I mean like a C172 speed from what I was told.
Love love love the Dash-7. Such a cool plane. Sloooooooooow.
@SixPapaCharlie an additional thought to your "STOL planes" observations at OSH:
Propellers blow over the wing too, besides the relative wind from the aircraft moving through the airmass. The faster flow in the center of the wing tends to "attach" the airflow to the center of the wing in a single, and the area behind the engines in a light twin. It even adds lift in that area.
The turbofan airliners don't get nearly the benefit from this effect as their propeller-driven smaller cousins, but in the case of those STOL landings, a pretty significant amount of the total lift being generated is from airflow caused by the prop flowing over portions of the wing.
Technique-wise, this means that when you chop the throttle in those when you're way on the back side of the power curve and shooting for a very short landing, enough lift is also "dumped" by doing that, that you'll be "done" flying at that point or very nearly so, depending on airspeed. That will tend to "plant" the wheels and maximum braking can be applied because the aircraft isn't "light" at that point and there's more weight on the tires -- more available friction on whatever surface they landed on.
In the twin, mixing a throttle chop with multi-blade propellers going "flat" when you pull off the power both removes a large amount of lift from both wings and also acts as a drag brake. If you're ready for it and only a couple feet in the air, and flare hard, you can nail an exact landing spot and still land smoothly. If you don't realize it's going to be a double aerodynamic whammy when you chop the throttle, you're going to "arrive" quite solidly. Thump. Or maybe Wham... if you did it too high off the ground.
Thus... the tendency to teach to land with some power in a twin... because it also weighs a lot more... triple whammy really.
In a single like mine with a STOL kit on it, modulating throttle when way behind the power curve with the nose way in the air and changing the airflow over the middle of the wing inside the stall fences (which help keep that airflow attached and organized) can really be used well to make extremely slow spot landings.
Think of those RC planes where they literally hang them from the prop or thrust vectored fighters. A propellor, a turbofan, whatever, may also be a significant part of "lift" depending on angle of where the thrust is going -- besides the lift created by the wing -- because of good old Newton and every action having an equal and opposite.
I hear tell that you Cirrus guys can't quite get that nose up very high because you run the risk of a tail strike. Haven't flown one, but there's folks here who've mentioned it. If you can find someone with an airplane with some lift devices that can fly really slow with tons of power, they can demonstrate the tail low nose high power on landing method to ya, and it's kinda fun, done right.
Risks involved: A go-around late with the nose in the air and perhaps pushing against tons of nose up trim can be a handful. You're too slow to climb out of ground effect and need to push to level off and wait for some airspeed to build before partial flap retraction to help speed up.
The Robertson Flap 30 takeoff procedure in the POH Addendum that gets added when the kit is added to the aircraft POH is essentially this in reverse. High (full) power, hard pull to get the nose up, liftoff in ground effect at about 40 knots indicated, and then relax a tiny bit of back pressure and wait ... flying about three to five feet above the runway surface until the excess horsepower has a chance to accelerate your draggy butt to a speed more consistent with a non-STOL departure.
If you removed some power right at that point of liftoff, you'd make a perfect main gear landing as long as you pulled again on the yoke because elevator is also in the propwash and becomes instantly less effective at holding the nose up when power is reduced.
Fun stuff.
