Teaching In Taildraggers

I've done enough instruction in the Cub now to understand it's the worst place in the world to do great flight instruction. Ever been in the front seat of one? Super Cubs don't count and neither do any of the new-age Cub knockoffs. They're as far from the 1930s ergonomic hell of a J-3 as a garbage truck is from an Audi TT.

Not everyone can even get in the front at all, much less elegantly. I lever my legs across the sill using the ceiling tubes for purchase. Getting out is a lot easier than getting in. Once in, it's no picnic for me, but it's torture for people over 6 feet. I'm 5 ft. 8 in. and I'm more or less curled up like a ball-turret gunner. At least nobody is shooting at me. You'd think the visibility over the nose would be better from the front, but it's not. You still have to crane way up or lean out the open door to see that Bonanza you're about to taxi into.

The front brakes work better than the rear, though, because they tie directly to the master cylinders rather than being connected through the stretchy cables that attach to the rear heel pedals. Not that it matters. You hardly need brakes in a taildragger at all except for the runup and maybe not even then if you don't mind doing a rolling runup. I can stay in the front seat for about an hour before I really want to get out and stretch my short legs.

I've been checking out a new partner in the Cub this week and it occurred to me that there are only two essential skills to teach. And teach is really the wrong word. I see the instructor's role as a kind of meat-powered envelope protection while the learning pilot figures out how not to make tire-sized craters on the initial landings and/or find the bottom of a runway-edge ditch for lack of grace on the pedals.

So the one skill almost unique to the J-3 Cub is the ability to judge depth perception, speed and lateral alignment with what are ludicrously inadequate peripheral cues. Looking forward, the pilot in back has a view of the instructor's fat head—in my case, it blots out and absorbs all light—and the trees and grass whizzing by out the side windows. So the essential skill is learning to imagine where the horizon is and to judge altitude without being able to see anything useful. It's a marvel of human adaptability that we can do this at all, let alone do it well, for nothing in human evolution equipped us for this.

And don't even compare this to a modern Cub, where you fly from the front and you can see over the nose. Same for clean-sheet LSA taildraggers. In those, you can do as you were probably taught: Look downrange to the end of the runway to help with depth and altitude perception. For three-pointers in a Cub, that doesn't work, although it does for wheelies.

The second essential skill is an aggressive dance on the pedals after touchdown. That tired old clich about flying a taildragger until it's tied down is more true of a J-3 than of any small rag wing taildragger I can think of. Some biplanes, like the Stearman, are similar. I find that when checking out someone new, the universal tendency is to sweat the three-pointer, then when the bounce is avoided, "phew, made it!" Then the feet go dead. But if left to its own devices, a Cub will happily start careening as it slows down in the three-point attitude and once past maybe 20 degrees off alignment, you're going for a ride.

In the front, I rest my feet on the pedals and if I don't feel vigorous input, I intervene. But after a few landings, almost everyone gets the feel of it and for me, there's no greater satisfaction than sensing that pedal awareness as the new pilot's feet come alive and the muscle memory sets in. This is a perishable skill, by the way. If I lay off for a while, the perceptions wither and that fine touch for a perfect three-point goes with it.

For as simple as the Cub is and for as much as I've flown them, I'm always surprised to learn something new. The other day I discovered that with two people in the airplane and a full tank of gas, it won't stall if the stall is commenced from near level flight. With full stick back, it just lacks the pitch authority. It will barely get into a mush. But in ground effect, it has more pitch bite and so has no problem getting into the three-point attitude. Burn off half the fuel and it behaves differently.

There's a payoff or two for the long-suffering CFI in the front seat. When the door is open—which it almost always is in a Cub—the front seat is guarded from the slipstream so the view out the right is unimpeded out and down. From 500 feet, watching a golfer whack one into a sand trap or a shirtless retiree mow crooked rows in his scruffy lawn is the quintessential reason to be a pilot. It's not the same from the window of a Cirrus.