Tomorrow…and……Tomorrow…

by Alan Marcum

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.