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Lesson 29: Finally Landing that Taildragger!Observant readers may note that there was no "Lesson28" post. Well, there really is one, I wrote it, but it's at work. I'll post it tomorrow. When I wrote it, I was one unhappy camper. It seemed like I'd been practicing landings forever, and just wasn't going to get it. Ever. Today ( Monday, April 29, 1996 ) was different. Things started really coming together. Today I landed that damned taildragger 16 times and my instructor only touched the controls twice! The landings weren't all greasers, not by any means. One was pretty high: I raised the nose til we stalled, and the plane fell with a *plop*. Only one or two of them were the "tailwheel touched first" kind. But I kept it stabilized on the approach, and running straight down the runway. Never drifted more than 5 feet from the centerline. Whee! This week saw the first really hot weather so far this year in the SF Bay Area. PAO ATIS showed 86 degrees. You could tell. The C120 climbed noticably slower than usual; each swing around the pattern, we wouldn't make it to pattern altitude until we were almost abeam the numbers. He was still doing the radio around the pattern, and watching out for traffic. Not that the radio is any problem; he just wanted me to really concentrate on flying the plane. One new thing I discovered: on that ascending turn from upwind to the crosswind leg: one actually has to push the yoke *forward* during the turn. Otherwise the airspeed goes down-down-down. Pushing the yoke forward keeps the airspeed up at Vy. Ascending turns are strange beasts in general: left aileron, and right rudder, just not as much right rudder as when climbing straight. Ugh! Solving the "we're high, pull down the power" problems is getting to be fun. The VASI is a tremendous crutch for students. Hopefully, after a few hundred more VASI-assisted landings, the sight pictures will be ingrained enough to do it without. This lesson's tape shows mostly radio chatter, and a minimum of comments from the right seat. Even the landing at PAO went reasonably well, until I had to hit the brakes to make the taxiway: I hit them unevenly, and the plane started to veer :-(. No problem; I can learn that. The brakes are just like on a car, except there's two of them and they don't work too well :-). - Jerry "41.6 Hours" Kaidor |