I can't claim any references for my opinion but I also tend to agree no more than 10 deg. flaps at the FAF, and add no more until having the runway in sight on short final if intending to land. Reasons are
1. You have to be flexible in your speed in case you are ahead of another airplane that is faster and waiting on you.
2. The cost of doing practice approaches goes up when flying at full flap speeds (75 vs. 95 knots).
3. Full flaps are neither required nor desirable on practice approaches and actually impede the missed approach somewhat.
The only tradeoff is that if you are adding flaps on late final for an actual imc approach, your configuration is changing, which is not a good practice in general and may be troublesome. FAA is definitely against it with their stabilized approach campaign. On the other hand someone mentioned that Skyhawks land well with no flaps at all, which is true, so it is less of an issue than for other airplanes.
Last edited by Cubdriver; 05-08-2008 at 09:39 AM.