When I started this thread I expressed my own personal preference for the best ab-initio training airplane.
There are many different airplanes used in training people for the PPL and for sure I have not flown anywhere near all of them.
Just to expand on why I chose the Fleet Canuck it was because I found it to have the best handling characteristics of the tail wheel airplanes I learned and taught on in the early fifties until the early sixties.
The school where I learned and worked as an instructor at had four Cessna 140's and four Fleet Canucks as their main training fleet.
The Fleet Canuck did have one small drawback in that there were no brakes on the right hand side, but its handling was so good the lack of brakes for the instructor was never a problem.
In the ten or so years I observed these machines train students there was zero loss of control incidents that I know of in all the thousands of take offs and landings these machines did.
We also had some other tail wheel airplanes over the years such as the PA12 probably Pipers best little machine. We also had a Cessna 170 another nice trainer.....then of course Cessna made the " Land O Matic " 172 and we all know what happened to tail wheel training after that.
The one airplane that was a bit tricky was the Piper Pacer / Clipper without right hand brakes and it was a bit more tricky to teach on.
So basically in my personal opinion it is better to have brakes on both sides of side by side trainers, but the lack of brakes on the instructors side does not mean the airplane is not suitable as a trainer.
Of course the above is subjective supported by having thousands of take offs and landings with zero loss of control.
Oh and while I am here rambling on and on there were two airplanes over my career that I really paid attention to on the runway....the Pitts Special and the Grumman Turbo Goose those suckers keep you awake on the runway.
