With some great coaching by Rachael, one of the stellar CFIs I'm working with on this taildragger endorsement, I rolled this Citabria onto the runway with minimal calamity!

Step one was to get the idea that I'm not going to grease this thing onto the runway like I do the Mooney I usually fly. Another stellar CFIs working with me on this project, Martin, explained it well. When executing a 3-point landing in a taildragger, the goal is to put the airplane into a full stall just before the wheels touch the runway. As Martin explained, you want a nice plop! onto the runway. Given human precision, the realistic goal is to get the full stall within about 6-9" above the runway—lower is better, ideally to that "just before" the wheels touch (i.e., ¼" above). Even a "great" 3-point landing in a taildragger isn't going to be a greaser.

Step two was to transfer my sight picture of the airplane sitting on the ground—in the 3-point attitude—into the air. (They're identical—except that the world is moving quickly in one case, sitting still in the other.)

Step three was to just fly. Do some airwork. Get comfortable in the airplane, get to where I, more or less effortlessly, get the airplane to do what I want it to do. Coordinated steep turns, coordinated power-on stalls, aileron-rudder exercises, slips: just spend some time flying, a few thousand feet above the ground.

Step four was to fly a low approach, with the wheels 6-12" off the runway. No fair landing this time: just a low approach. Sliiide to the left, sliiide to the right (no criss-cross!), get used to maneuvering the airplane and putting it where I want.

Step five was to go to an airport with a longer runway. Palo Alto's not exactly a short field for a Citabria, but let's take advantage of more pavement to give me more time to let things settle. Half Moon Bay has more than 4200 feet available for landing, compared with Palo Alto with less than 2500. Overfly the field, enter the right downwind 30 on the 45, turn base, turn final, calm winds so no sideslip needed, keep it aligned, flare, let it settle, stick back, hold it, stick back hold-it-do not push forward-hold-it back back and down! Now, dance on the rudder pedals to keep the airplane tracking straight, quick short jabs each way, gentle on the brakes.

Phew!

Several more landings, landings that happened about as I expected they would. No real surprises.

Maybe I'll actually get the hang of this!

(Picture above and right of Half Moon Bay Airport from AirNav, taken by David Newcomer.)

Flying this Citabria thing is nuts.

Okay, flying it isn't so bad. It's landing it that's nuts.

What I usually fly doesn't fly quite like a Citabria. By comparison, the Citabria feels like a kite. It's light, flutters in the breeze. It's light on the rudders, with not much aileron-rudder coordination built into the flight controls. There's some adverse yaw if in a turn if you fly flat-footed, but not as much as some of the older-design ragwing taildraggers I've flown, like a Taylorcraft L-2 or a Piper J-3. That lightness changes how the airplane feels sometimes, like in turbulence. But it's not a huge change. (If you like numbers, see the pseudo-footnote at the bottom.)

What I usually fly doesn't land at all like a Citabria. Bounce a Mooney on landing in a way that pitches the nose high and you better get the nose down so you don't whack the tail on the runway. It's not good to whack a Mooney's tail on the runway. Sure, Mooneys are strong—love that roll cage and single-piece wing spar!—but not strong enough to like a hard whack on that all-flying fully-trimming tail.

Bounce a Citabria on landing, pitching the nose up, and the deal is to just hold it in that attitude and let it settle. Bounce too high? Power power power and climb away, or just a quick shot of power to cushion the next touchdown. But keep the stick back! I gotta remember: taildraggers are designed to take a tail strike (okay, a gentle tail strike) on every 3-point landing!

So, I learned some good stuff over the past few flights. It's a ton of fun flying this airplane a few inches or maybe a foot off the runway in a low approach, getting the feel for the airplane, getting some confidence in my ability to keep the airplane aligned with the runway, to sliiiiide to the left, then sliiiiide to the right, and sliiiiide back to the left, all while 6" off the deck at ±60-65 mph. I have about 30 seconds of this playtime on each pass before it's time to power up, pitch up, and climb up, up and away for the next pass.

​Fun fun fun!

Pseudo-footnote:

For my fellow techno-geeks out there, whether you're engineers, scientists, or some other flavor of in-the-numbers deep diggers. My Mooney's wing loading [maximum takeoff weight] is 16.6 pounds per square foot. The Citabria [7ECA]? 10.6 pounds per square foot. For what it's worth, power loading is similar: 13.3 pounds per horsepower for the Mooney, 14.0 for the Citabria.

Oh, and rudder coordination? Flying my Mooney, I barely need to worry about the rudder in turns. I should, but I don't need to. Climbing at high power and low airspeed, sure, I need right rudder, but not so much for turn coordination.

I was out of town for essentially all of November…so…no flying (sniff!). Before I left, though, we managed to sneak in one lesson—I can't call it a flight, because we stayed on the ground. It was important to refresh my memory, both intellectual and muscle, about how to taxi a ragwing taildragger. To say it's sluggish is an understatement.

Okay, it's not as sluggish as flying a blimp, but it's still pretty bad. You need to lead the turn, and then lead exiting the turn. Steering by tailwheel is anemic, at least in the Citabria. It helps to have some speed, and a bit of prop wash over the tail so that the rudder gains enough effectiveness to help with the turn.

Then, in December, there was weather. Some of it was pretty stormy, some was just not inviting for the kind of flying we want to do. Up next is to really fly the airplane (I don't want to think about landing an airplane until I know how it flies. We'll see what the attitude is at near the stalling speed. (Yes, that's the 3-point attitude, just like on the ground, but I also want to know how it feels, not just looks.) What's the adverse yaw like in the airplane? What's it take to coordinate the ailerons and rudder? How sensitive is the elevator? Stuff like that.) For this, we wanted good VFR conditions, and what we got was barely marginal VFR.

So, we scrubbed and had lunch. And talked about flying.

The plan had been to start (continue, really) my work on the tailwheel endorsement this past Friday.

That was the plan. The reality: my instructor cancelled late the night before. Unfortunately, I'm unavailable all of November. I'd hoped to get one flight in, maybe two, to refresh all the muscle memory so that any visualization review I did during the month would have value.

In the grand scheme of things, it's a small obstacle. So, more on this adventure in a month.

Rachael in the Mighty Mouse Aircam 20ft over the reservoir before flying to the coast and waving to all the beach goers on a Friday afternoon. OMG WHAT IS MY LIFE?! (honestly most of it is very unglamorous as I have a special ferry permit from the FSDO to drive my teenage and tween kids around while they are living their best life and trying to keep dick pics off the internet.)