Flying this Thing is Nuts

by Alan Marcum

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!

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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.