Tail Dragger and Tricycle Landing Gears


Tail Dragger and Tricycle Landing Gears

The type of airplanes that the average Joe flies, like our friends and us, will have one of two types of landing gears. We're not fat cats who fly private jets or twin engines with retractable gears, i.e. gears that fold up into the belly once the plane is airborne. No, people like us fly either Tail Draggers or airplanes with Tricycle Landing Gears.

The picture below is of our friends, Vince and Sharon, who built an RV8. Like our RV7, this airplane is a Tail Dragger. A Tail Dragger has two wheels in front and a tiny little tail wheel in back. It takes more skill to fly a Tail Dragger, as it is squirrelly when accelerating down a runway just before takeoff, and also when landing. It's pretty easy for an inexperienced pilot to ground-loop a Tail Dragger.

Heck, when my husband was first learning how to fly the KitFox2, which is also a Tail Dragger, he ground-looped it. He has almost three thousand of hours' worth of flying time. But at that time, few hours in that particular airplane. As a result, he lost control of it when the front wheels touched pavement and the tail caused it to whip around violently. The plane was quite bent up. Mike mothballed it in the hangar for almost a year before fixing it.


The picture below is of a plane with a Tricycle Landing Gear. The wheel in the front makes them more stable when taking off and landing, and thus are easier to fly. Student pilots generally learn to fly in planes with Tricycle Landing Gears.



Comments

  1. Sharon HimslApril 23, 2014 at 7:12 PM

    Well, there I am sitting in the back seat. That was a fun day tooling around Joseph, Oregon. Vince is getting fired up to go flying again. Personally, I think some of the best pilots fly this way :)
    Shells–Tales–Sails

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