Originally Posted by
Tortoise
It caused an awful lot of paperwork and demonstrated that 3.5 hours in a taildragger does not necessarily undo the habits of 140 odd hours flying non taildraggers especially when the workload goes up unexpectedly.
I had my first taste of traildragger in a Cessna 170. The majority of my ~200 hours are in 172s, I think that lulled me into a false sense of security because in the air it behaves very similarly to a 172. By the end of the 30 minutes I was able to perform a takeoff without prompting from my instructor, but landings... well... he had to take over on all of them. The touchdowns were not a problem (the 3 point landing attitude is essentially the same as the 172 landing attitude) but the twitchy direction changes requiring ever increasing amounts of rudder as the aircraft slows was just too much for me. The 170 just loves to ground loop and you needed to be further ahead of it than I was. Good times though.