Yes, of course, you can buy and happily fly a tailwheel airplane. They aren’t magic, although some of them are so charismatic that they come close. Plus, there is the cool factor associated with them and the oft-heard but most definitely not true phrase—you aren’t a real pilot unless you can fly tailwheel airplanes.
Unfortunately, the cool factor of tailwheel airplanes has a way of causing pilots to make purchase decisions even more irrationally than they do with nosewheel airplanes. It might be a good idea to devote a branch of psychiatry to a study of tailwheel airplane purchase decisions. Sadly, a subbranch might be included to look into the effect of testosterone poisoning on those purchase decisions as well as operations that immediately follow the phrase, “Watch this y’all!”
Safety
Let’s bring the accident history of tailwheel airplanes front and center. First, if you are flying a tailwheel airplane, no matter how good of a pilot you are, you are two to three times more likely to roll the thing into a ball on landing than in a nosewheel airplane. That’s the nature of a flying machine that has its center of gravity aft of the main landing gear. The laws of physics are immutable; there’s no appeal from a violation.
The good thing is that those types of accidents—runway loss of control or RLOC—usually involve impacts at below stall speed and are not likely to cause serious injury or death unless you aren’t wearing shoulder harnesses or they aren’t available. Then, no matter how well you think you can brace yourself—you can’t—your head is going into the instrument panel and the party is likely to be over.
The bigger risk is stalling the airplane or hitting something because there seems to be a connection between tailwheel airplanes and the desire to fly low and/or go into remote, short airstrips and gravel bars where the margin for error is lousy. Most of the two-place tailwheel airplanes have wings with no dihedral, substantial adverse aileron yaw and stall behavior that includes rolling aggressively if the ball is not dead center when they stall. That usually means a loss of at least 500 feet if the pilot does everything right in the recovery.
Finally, over the years we’ve noticed a lot of two-place tailwheel airplanes coming on the market with under 300 hours total time. We’ve found that a certain proportion of the sellers bought their machines as a second or third airplane and tended to think of them as toys. In our opinion, they didn’t respect the very real demands those planes put on a pilot. The owners then scared themselves and put them up for sale.
We’ve also seen some fatal accidents where the pilots of STOL two-place tailwheel airplanes disregarded the POH instructions—such as making crosswind takeoffs flaps-up in a Husky—and crashed out of low-altitude, low-speed and low-energy flight regimes.
In our opinion, anyone buying a tailwheel airplane has to respect them and show it by getting a good checkout, flying frequently and taking regular recurrent training.
Know Thyself
Without realizing it, Socrates gave excellent advice to potential tailwheel airplane buyers. If you are considering buying a tailwheel airplane we think it is wise to take some time to give yourself hard answers to a number of questions.
What kind of flying do I normally do? What kind of flying do I want to do over the next five years or so? What is my comfort level with the type of flying that I think I want to do? Am I willing to spend the money to get the training and recurrent training that I need to do that kind of flying without putting my family and myself at risk—physically and financially? Why do I really want a tailwheel rather than a nosewheel airplane? Can I establish and live up to personal minimums appropriate to the demands of a tailwheel airplane? Can I set aside any need to feel macho when it comes to an airplane purchase decision?
Do I really need a tailwheel airplane for the flying I’m going to be doing? The Peterson conversions of the Cessna 182 (notably the King Katmai) will get in and out as short as any tailwheel airplane and the beefed-up nosegear will handle the same kind of rough terrain.
Research
As with any airplane purchase, serious research into the type in which you are interested is important—for a tailwheel airplane we think it’s essential because, in our experience, there are more potential hidden problems to find and avoid. Because of the tail-low position when parked, aft fuselage corrosion can be a big issue.
Some tailwheel airplanes have handling quirks/features that may be a nonstarter. For example, the Luscombe Sedan has limited nose-up elevator travel and must be wheel landed; Cessna 180s and 185s have a 4-inch narrower cabin that their nosewheel brethren, 182s made after the early 1960s and the 206 series, making them uncomfortable for larger occupants.
If there is a type club for the airplane(s) in which you are interested join it/them and bury yourself in the technical material in their libraries. They also will probably have suggestions for knowledgeable instructors from whom you can get a checkout.
Reach out to owners and ask about their experiences. Find out about maintenance concerns, handling challenges and areas to watch on a prebuy exam. Type club members will also have recommendations for maintenance techs who have solid experience with the type and can do a prebuy.
Read the Aviation Consumer Used Aircraft Guide on the types in which you are interested. If at all possible, fly at least one example of the type to see if it’s what you expected or want. Is the pilot’s seat suitably adjustable for your physique? Is there room for the people and stuff you want to haul? Can you and your expected passengers get in and out easily?
If there is a way to log time in the type of airplane in which you are interested, do it. That is especially important when it comes to applying for insurance—you don’t want to have to put zero in the time in type space on the application. Having even one hour is better than none at all, according to insurance brokers.
Look at the real-life weight and balance paperwork to see if the useful load is adequate and the center of gravity range is realistic for what you’ll be carrying.
If you are looking at something made in very small quantities, go in with your eyes open as parts may be unobtainable and finding an instructor for a checkout and recurrent training challenging. They can also be difficult to insure.
If you are going the antique, classic or warbird route, getting guidance from someone knowledgeable in the type is even more important because of the amounts of money that can be involved, handling that can be unexpected or difficult for someone not trained on airplanes built before engineers really understood stability and control as well as systems that are counterintuitive and can kill you. We note that respected warbird pilot and author Jeff Ethell was killed in a P-38 that had a fuel system different from what he was used to and he ran a tank dry too low to get an engine restart.
We reviewed warbird ownership in our August 2017 issue, vintage aircraft in the January 2023 issue and antiques and classics in the March 2017 issue.
By the way, never seek advice about an aircraft type from someone who is trying to sell you something.
Insurance
Before you make an offer on any airplane, confirm that you can get insurance for it. We are not kidding. In our last conversation with the insurance broker we use, he told us that thus far this year he’s had two prospective customers come to him having already purchased airplanes it turned out that no insurance company would cover them in. It was a very expensive mistake for the two.
Insurance for a tailwheel airplane is going to be more expensive than for a comparable nosewheel airplane. It’s a fact of life because the tailwheel machines have a higher accident rate. In addition, you may not be able to get as much coverage as you would in a nosewheel bird. We are frequently told of owners who cannot buy anything other than “sublimit” policies. The most common is a $1 million policy that has a $100,000 sublimit per person. So, if you have an accident an injure someone, there is only $100,000 available to resolve that person’s claim against you. If you have the money to own an airplane, that kind of coverage may not be adequate. That is especially true when you could buy a $1 million “smooth” policy (no per-person sublimits, the full million is available to resolve a claim even if only one person is hurt) in a nosewheel airplane.
You will “age out” of insurance on tailwheel airplanes younger than you will on nosewheel airplanes. Our research indicated that insurers differ on the age where policy prices ramp up steeply for tailwheel machines and at which a pilot can no longer buy coverage. However, it’s older in nosewheel airplanes.
A factor to consider is that insurance companies are scared to death of relatively low-time-in-type pilots in expensive tailwheel airplanes. If you have limited or no tailwheel time, don’t buy a new Husky or Carbon Cub—you might not be able to get coverage and if you do, it’s going to cost a fortune. Buy an older, cheaper one first and get a few hundred hours in it and then step up to new.
If you are over 60 and considering buying tailwheel without a lot of time in type, it’s going to be tough. If 70 or over, forget it. Our conversations with brokers indicate that no insurance company will write coverage.
Price
The cachet of tailwheel carries a premium. Most of the time the tailwheel version of an airplane is more expensive than the nosewheel model, even when the cabin is smaller such as with the Cessna 180/182/185/206.
Cubs have historically been more expensive than Aeronca Champs even though the Champ is very slightly faster and has slightly better handling. We think that it’s because of the clamshell door on the Cub and the ability to fly around with it open.
No Damage History
Unless the tailwheel airplane you are considering is just out of the factory, assume that it has a damage history because it almost certainly does. The reason that very few FBOs rent tailwheel airplanes is because pilots keep wrecking them. Insurance is high for tailwheel airplanes because so many pilots lose control on rollout on landing and do enough damage to them to make an insurance claim.
Your job as a prospective buyer is to figure out if the airplane structure is in good shape regardless of the repairs it has had. You’re looking for evidence of lousy repair work that is going to be expensive to fix correctly. You want to find it early so you can walk away rather than at the first annual after you’ve bought the thing.
We have seen a number of older tailwheel airplanes on the market that look good superficially but that had so many problems that fixing them was going to be more expensive than the purchase price.
That is why you pay good money to a tech who really knows the type of airplane to go over it with eyes that’ve seen a lot of those airplanes. You do not want to buy into a financial nightmare.
A lot of tailwheel airplanes don’t get flown more than 20-40 hours a year, so they corrode and your tech is going to need to use a borescope to look carefully inside the airframe and the engine to find it. It can be very expensive to fix.
A very big deal on tailwheel airplanes is the condition of the landing gear (bent, twisted, sprung?) and whether it is aligned correctly. An A&P friend told us about an owner who was having a terrible time with directional control in his Cessna 170 and wondered what he was doing wrong. The A&P flew it and it was a mess. It wouldn’t track anywhere near straight ahead. Rule of thumb, when taxiing a tailwheel airplane in calm winds if you have to hold rudder one way or another, something is wrong. The 170 turned out to have one main landing gear toed in too far. The fix, per the service manual, was quick and easy. The owner wasn’t doing anything wrong, his airplane landing gear was misaligned.
The Cessna 195 has a horrible record of runway LOC accidents, yet they are a pussycat to handle on the ground if the gear is properly rigged. The problem is that it’s not all that easy to rig correctly and the West Coast 195 guru, Jeff Pearson at the Chino, California Airport, often tells us of the out of rig landing gear conditions he sees on those airplanes.
What We Like
That’s a tough one. We like tailwheel airplanes, we just approach them with a lot of respect. In our experience in flying many of them and talking with owners, we haven’t found any to stay away from, even though some have marginal reputations. Our experience with pilots badmouthing airplanes has been along the lines of a poor workman blaming his tools.
Piper
Wow. If you lined up all the Piper tailwheel airplanes in the world they’d probably go for miles and there would be at least one more opinion about them then there are airplanes. The collection of two- and four-place tailwheel Pipers and tailwheel conversions is truly vast.
Handling is 1930s-’40s stability and control requiring the ability to use the rudder. They will happily spin if aggravated, but they don’t do anything unexpected on takeoff or landing and have more than adequate controls to make the airplane go where you want.
Maule
A huge collection of mostly four-place tube-and-fabric, old-school STOL airplanes (some will carry more). Big cabin doors on many of them for loading bulky stuff. Good brakes, positive controls although the aileron-rudder interconnect takes a little getting used to. Pick your power and there’s probably one in your price range.
Prices are such that we think you can get a four-place STOL Maule for what the popular two-place STOL birds command and you can carry a lot more where you need it, faster.
Cessna
Cessna built tailwheel airplanes from 1927 through 1986 (there was a break in the early ‘30s) with jaw-dropping numbers coming out of the factory immediately after WWII. There are scores of mods. All-metal construction for the later versions with parts generally available. Cessna pretty much wrote the book on straightforward systems. With long-range tanks, some of the models are true camels. The bigger they are, the more careful the checkout required as there can be a lot of mass that can get going in the wrong direction quickly.
Stinson
The postwar 108 series are economical, have good handling and are much loved. It’s getting more challenging to find maintenance techs who know the Franklin engine.
CubCrafters
What can we say? Amazing performance in modern production and experimental versions.
Aviat
The modern Super Cub, serious STOL with slightly crisper handling. They are a pleasure to fly, although we strongly recommend flying them by the book on takeoff and landing.
Aeronca/American Champion
This company defines the full range of modern two-place tailwheel aircraft. The Aeronca Champ, Chief and four-place Sedan have been the stuff of legend since they were introduced. The Sedan is an under-recognized four-place cruiser and load-carrier popular in the bush. The line sets the standard against which all tailwheel airplanes are measured for ground handling. Downside one is heavy, slow ailerons and poor useful load on some two-place models—check that carefully when considering a purchase.
Luscombe
Always fastest among its peers for the horsepower. The prewar radial engine models had utterly awful ground handling and the bad rep won’t go away. The horizontally opposed engine versions don’t have that problem and do have sharp, positive control response. A Luscombe will cruise with a Cessna 150 despite having fewer horses up front.
Experimental
So many wonderful airplanes, so few pages to write about them. Kudos to the Van’s RV series of amazing kit planes that have taken the world by storm. We’ve watched and flown them in the mountains and reveled in their runway performance and cruise speed. We also admit that we simply can’t get into the earlier ones due to cockpit size.
Overall we enjoy the heck out of the handling and good manners on the runway, but there are areas of the performance envelope where the airplanes can’t meet FAR requirements for stability, control and handling and we think a careful checkout is required to avoid surprises.
SeaRey, CubCrafters, the list goes on and on. We are enamored of homebuilt aircraft although we’ve seen some scary bad construction, so an effective prebuy and checkout is essential.
Conclusion
Do the soul-searching before buying tailwheel—leave your ego at home and evaluate the important stuff: safety, cost, insurance, personal minimums, willingness to fly regularly and train regularly.
Tailwheel Training: What’s Involved?
The open door of the Citabria in the picture is, to us, the door to adventure. Not just to the adventure of flight, but also to the adventure and sheer pleasure of working to one’s limits to learn to fly a tailwheel airplane. As with life in general, the hardest things to learn often prove the most rewarding following the effort and sweat to achieve mastery. You want to learn to fly tailwheel airplanes? You can do it, but you’re going to come out of it realizing that you’ve just plain worked hard and there were no shortcuts in the process.
Fired up? Good, now let’s talk about what’s involved in learning to keep the tailwheel at the opposite end of an airplane’s direction of travel at all times.
Where to start? We recommend simultaneously searching for a flight school that gives tailwheel training as you review tailwheel training videos and books. For video training courses we think that the best out there is from Sporty’s (www.sportys.com), “Tailwheel Checkout Course with Patty Wagstaff.” We reviewed it in the March 2022 issue of Aviation Consumer. The price is $149.99 and, in our opinion, worth it.
One of two books we recommend is The Compleat Taildragger Pilot by Harvey Plourde. The lowest price we found was $27.95 at Sporty’s. The other is The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It. Full disclosure; we wrote it. Best price we found was $7.99 for the Kindle edition at Amazon.
Getting a tailwheel checkout may involve travel. If so, we recommend going to a school that will have you fly at least twice a day so that you minimize relearning time needed when you space the lessons out. Rule of thumb is to budget for 10 hours of flying time for a checkout to the proficiency required for the tailwheel endorsement required by FAR Part 61.31(i). You will be required to show proficiency at a level set by your instructor in normal and crosswind landings, wheel landings and go-around procedures.
We note that few of the schools that give tailwheel checkouts allow the new tailwheel pilots to rent the airplane afterward. If that’s important, find the right school.
If you are buying a tailwheel airplane, we strongly recommend that you get your training in that type of airplane or one quite similar. If you don’t get your endorsement in your new airplane, arrange for an instructor with experience in type to then fly with you for an in-depth orientation and checkout in your airplane. It’s not unusual for tailwheel airplanes, especially older ones, to have systems (notably fuel) that are different from what you are used to—don’t be one of those pilots who get burned by an unconventional or nonintuitive system out of ignorance of its foibles.
A school should willingly provide you with a syllabus of its checkout course as well as suggestions for study prior to your first lesson. A copy of the POH for the airplane that you can review ahead of time will save you money on the ground school portion of the checkout.
We’ve looked at a lot of syllabi for tailwheel checkouts and think that yours should include at least the following:
• Involved discussion geared at developing a visceral understanding what it means to have the center of gravity aft of the main gear and the need to take action to stop every turn; an absolute intolerance of imprecision—if the nose isn’t pointed within a degree of where it should be, fix it immediately; and a willingness to put a control to the stop to get the airplane to do what the pilot desires. Discussion of the need for touchdown with minimum energy for maximum control on rollout and the dangers of carrying extra speed on final, particularly with wheel landings because of risk of loss of control on rollout.
• Initial operations on grass if possible. Taxiing with accommodation for wind; use of full rudder travel; normal takeoff; rudder-aileron coordination exercises; steep turns; stalls; three-point landings; introduction to go-arounds.
• Recovery from swerves while taxiing; speed and pitch control on approach; crosswind three-point landings; short- and soft-field takeoffs and landings.
• Introduce wheel landings; recovery from PIO; and emergencies at various points in the pattern.
• Demonstrate proficiency in three-point and wheel landings with speed on final for wheel landings not faster than 5 knots more than for three-point (per Patty Wagstaff, former national aerobatic champion and current tailwheel instructor); crosswind landings; recovery from bounced landing; go-arounds; emergencies; short- and soft-field takeoffs and landings.
We note that the late Randy Sohn, chief check pilot for the Commemorative Air Force, referred to wheel landings as a crutch for the incompetent. We agree and are of the opinion that by the time a pilot completes a tailwheel checkout that he or she should fully understand the risks and benefits of both wheel and three-point landings and when each is appropriate for the type of aircraft being flown and the weather conditions—and that extra speed on final is never a tailwheel pilot’s friend.
Go get checked out—you’ll be glad you did.
—Rick Durden
