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Old 17th February 2004 | 15:18
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Genghis the Engineer
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I'm not even going to try and second guess the superb advice of people like Airbedane who has far more taildragger hours in more types than I have. Nonetheless I do fly a lot of low-speed flying machines and would like to offer one thought.

Many of the more interesting taildraggers were designed in the days before narrow runways - airfields were sort of square-ish and you landed as near as you reasonably could into wind. But they are also very good low-speed, short-field aeroplanes.

So at many modern airfields it is entirely do-able to bring the crosswind component down to a much smaller value so long as you have a reasonable feel for take-off and landing distances.

How - use the runway diagonal !

Let's say you have a 15kn wind at 30° off the runway heading, that's a moderately sporting 7˝ crosswind component. Land on a 20° diagonal it comes down to a 2˝kn component that you won't even notice, and a sufficiently large headwind that most taildraggers flown to a full-stall 3-pointer will be stationary in very little indeed.

Just thought I'd mention it. It's incidentally the way I was taught to fly microlights, and have regularly used it for taildraggers - looks inelegant to the casual bystander but causes no real nuisance so long as you turn gently onto heading as soon as you're airborne.

G
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