Mire Stirewalt wrote: >> My opinion remains that it's about the dumbest thing one can do in a KR, or any airplane. <<
How do we learn things? Practice! Quite often I'll fly up to nearby airport with no traffic and a 6000' runway and do 10-12 touch and goes just to hone my landings. These include tail all the way down and then full throttle to go through the regime you dread so much TWICE with every touch and go. You could argue that I should minimize my risk and simply fly around the area for an hour and then just land once...or better yet, don't fly at all! That's a lot safer. Learning the behavior of your plane in the critical phase between flight and landing is probably THE most important aspect of flying a taildragger. Why not take a cram course and really learn it in a couple of afternoons with calm winds and no other distractions than learning the nuances of how the plane reacts? I went out early on calm days before anybody else was flying and do one down 36, do a U-turn, and then do another one down 18, calling it in the the radio the whole time. Another thing you quickly notice is how quickly the tail is up and rotation speed is achieved. This is a good data point for how much runway you're going to need. You can test the way it handles with and without flaps, for example. And you quickly learn where the stick should be, and how to gently let the tail down after pulling power and slowly giving it full forward stick. If you leave the ground without this kind of experience you might do something really stupid...like try to take off with the stick full aft or something! Taxi testing is a great opportunity to master the most critical part of landing, so on your first flight you can concentrate on the NEXT most important part of landing a KR...getting the speed right to make (or simulate) the first landing. You'll already have a really good feel for the transition phase, so you are dividing up the learning effort, and the stress of that first landing. If my plane were super squirrelly, I'd want to identify that early and FIX it before my first flight. The gear may not be aligned properly, for example. My taxi testing wasn't a testimony to my skill...I had 18 hours in a Champ, which is nothing like a KR. My KR2S handles wonderfully on the ground. Troy Petteway says KRs are the best handling taildraggers he knows of, and mine is the best handling KR he's ever flown. If it were a real handful, I'd want to know that before my first landing, and would certainly try to fix it before I tried to land it under the duress of something like an engine-out on takeoff on my very first landing. How much do we want to stack the odds against ourselves on the first flight? Why not master the transition and get past one of the biggest hurdles before that big flight? Obviously, I'm convinced that taxi testing is a no-brainer. Just don't START your learning on a windy, gusty day with the stick full aft, and you'll likely be fine... Mark Langford ML at N56ML.com http://www.n56ml.com
