Taildraggers, what’s different?
Have you ever noticed how some airplanes have one wheel in the front and two in the back? And others have two big wheels at the front and one all the way back on the tail. The first is called a tricycle landing gear. The second is called a tailwheel, or conventional landing gear. Landing gear can be wheels, skis, floats, whatever you use to move on the ground.
What’s the difference between taildraggers and tricycles?
The tricycle gear is by far the most common in the world. It is simpler and easier to use. A tail wheel takes a different set of skills. Pilots who fly taildraggers tend to have a little bit of pride because of this. Thus you may hear sayings like ‘real pilots fly taildraggers.’
Weight of the engine over the wheels
With a tailwheel airplane, the engine, where there is a huge amount of the weight of the airplane, is sticking out in front of where the wheels are. This creates kind of an instability with maneuvering, because so much of your weight is sticking outside of your wheelbase. If you do not keep complete control of the airplane, that weight can pull you in a way that you don’t want to go.
In a tricycle gear airplane, the wight is balanced within the wheel base, giving you a lot more stability.
What could happen to a taildragger?
For example the wind could blow from the side, hitting the vertical fin at the back of the airplane. Because the airplane will want to pivot into the wind like a weather vane, this can cause the aircraft to swing around and probably break something if you do not put in the right corrections right away. In a nose wheel airplane, the front wheel makes it easy to correct for things like this, countering out the tendency of the tail to want to turn. But in a tailwheel airplane, the tailwheel is not very influential in this type of situation.
Are taildraggers dangerous?
In this way taildraggers could be considered more dangerous. However, if you are landing on a rough surface of any kind, many taildraggers will be better because the propeller is higher, therefor farther from anything getting thrown up at it. Also, because the tailwheel is directly connected to the frame, it can be stronger than a nose wheel that is just fixed underneath the engine compartment and is relatively fragile. You will notice that many airplanes used in isolated areas or bush bush flying kind of situations will be taildraggers. They are rugged and strong. And in my opinion, in general, taildraggers look cooler than tricycles.
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