By attempting to pick holes in them, and getting egg on my face, I have learnt valuable stuff about definitions.

Absolutely the story .. there are no stupid questions in this game .. but it is a bit silly not to ask those questions. Certainly not a case of getting egg on face .. it's all about trying to make sense of stuff to a level of detail useful to your needs. That's why I cite links to this and that .. half the difficulty for a new pilot is finding out where to go to find answers.

I can't help with the Foxbat, unfortunately. However, with these very small aircraft, often the design standard is not the FARs so you need to be careful trying to map normal category certification things across to an aircraft designed to a different set of rules. The relevant rule set, however, will tell you stuff about how the ASI is to be marked.

Here are two other points, I believe are relevant.

1) Respect for one's betters can be viewed as one cause of the Tenerife disaster. It's bad CRM and should not be encouraged.

2) IMHO, it is dangerous for pilot's to learn to brush over cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is where someone believes two contradictory things at the same time. I might not be using the term exactly properly. An example might be. "Weather report said it was fine to go flying, so its fine to go fly", and "Those clouds look grey and not fine to fly in". IMHO, if someone mentally brushes over things, it can cause problems.

The flip side of this is that if someone gets too obsessional, they can lose the wood for the trees. I don't think that has happened here, because I now know that I can stop caring what the *real* definition of Vso is, because what happens at the bottom of the white arc while landing is very important, and because if you understand why Va changes with mass, then you will automatically understand a lot of stuff.

Respect for one's betters can be viewed as one cause of the Tenerife disaster

I think you need to read up a bit more on the Los Rodeos mishap. In particular, too high a cockpit authority gradient Respect is fine, where earned .. excessive deference is the problem.

Questions between left and right seats are fine. But, at the end of the day, excluding those situations where the two pilots are of similar background, the usually seen situation is a captain far more experienced that the copilot. The copilot might think he/she knows it all .. but reality sometimes does not match perception. The best cockpits are where all crew members participate, communicate and do their respective jobs but, at the end of the day, the left seater gets the bullet if it all turns to custard.

That's what I meant, but didn't say.

Another point I overlooked first time around. You made a comment earlier .. says that the Vso is 32 kts. Page 20 says to do a short field landing approach at 49 kts, with full flaps. That makes the approach speed 1.5 Vso. An important thing to keep in mind is that all those speed factors are based on CAS, not IAS. So, anytime you want to play with the numbers,

(a) convert IAS to CAS using the PEC chart
(b) do the sum
(c) convert the answer CAS back to IAS.

Quite important back near stall where the PEC usually is maximised.

Just applying the factor to IAS can give you quite an erroneous understanding of what might be going on.

Some comments on Va in the other thread ..