Around the patch

It’s not just me. Seems like all of AOPA has tailwheel fever this year, starting with our AOPA Sweepstakes Cessna 170 airplane giveaway. We’ve found a lovingly cared-for 1953 Cessna 170B, and we are making it into the very best bushplane it can be. You’ll see it at fly-ins and airshows around the United States, so be sure to follow its progress on our website.

Then there’s the aerobatic Extra airplane that is temporarily residing at AOPA. Editor at Large Dave Hirschman—who flies taildraggers more than anything else—has been using this 300-horsepower rocket ship with a tiny tailwheel to introduce folks to aerobatics and upset recovery. Everyone who’s jammed themselves into the Extra has been crowbarred back out wearing a giant grin, myself included.

I’ve been working on a tailwheel endorsement in a Cessna 140 here at Frederick Municipal Airport (FDK), and it is a flavor of flying unlike any other. It stresses you, but in a good way. It is equal parts work and exhilaration.

The 140 I’m flying has an 85-horsepower engine. That’s a big step back from 225 horses in the Cessna 182 I had been flying, but it is absolutely all the horsepower I can handle as I work to refine wheel landings and three-point landings. Nothing happens too fast.

I had started a tailwheel endorsement in 2004 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, flying an Aeronca Champ. But I didn’t get the actual endorsement—I was there for a specific number of days, and I ran out of time. After learning to fly and logging hundreds of hours in a tricycle-gear airplane, the whole “dance on the rudder pedals” aspect of flying was perplexing. I actually ran off the runway into a field during one landing—what you may know as a “runway excursion”—which my instructor allowed to happen to show me the consequences of improper rudder use. (God bless you, Earl Downs.) When I got back to Maryland, there was no time nor an available airplane to pick back up and finish.

Things are a little different this time. Instead of a beautifully maintained Aeronca Champ (tandem seat, no flaps) I’m flying a beautifully maintained Cessna 140 (side-by-side seating, 40 degrees of flaps) based here at Frederick Municipal Airport. The instructor and owner, Frank Watson, is as kind and patient as Earl was, so I have no doubts that I’ll complete the endorsement. Beyond that, I plan to become proficient in tailwheel flying.

In 2004 I learned that you must “dance on the rudder pedals” when operating a tailwheel airplane on the ground, lest you set yourself up for a ground loop by allowing the tailwheel to yaw too much to the left or right.

This time around, in addition to talking about “dancing on the rudder pedals,” Frank explained that you put in rudder and then immediately take it out—you don’t just keep adding rudder. Even though my brain understood that I was not supposed to keep pressing the rudder pedal and then holding it there when making directional inputs on the ground, the message did not get through to my feet. I was pushing in rudder and holding it in until the airplane began to move in that direction. That’s too much pressure.

Now I understand to jab the rudder and step back—more like a fighter than a dancer. But a fighter with grace, of course.

For a while it seemed almost impossible to find a flight school with a tailwheel airplane available for training, thanks to the cost of insurance. That seems to have eased, at least in my part of the country. If you have access to a taildragger, even if just for an introductory flight, treat yourself. Experience this seat-of-the-pants, grassroots type of flying for yourself and you’re bound to acquire some finesse that you can carry back to your tricycle gear airplane. FT