Why did older airplanes tilt back?

Factual Questions
21

Real old pilot here. Learned when there was no requirement for a tail wheel endorsement.
I have over 3000 hrs in C-180’s.
I have about 5000 hrs total in tail draggers of all types and sizes.

I gots lots of stories but that is for another time.

Wise old pelicans told me and I always remember and never forget:

The only time to relax when acting as the pilot of an Beech-18 ( twin engine tail dragger ) is after it is chained to the ground and you are 100 feet away.

Mass, mass, mass… ( C-170 and C-180 are not much different in size and the power difference at idle upon landing is minor but the mass… A lot of C-170 drivers have a real hard time in the much heavier C-180… You got to remember the mass…

Stance has a lot to do with it also. Piper Cub has narrow main gear and the t/w is far back in comparison. A Swift has a wide main gear with a short distance to the t/w. Plus has less rudder authority at landing than a Cub. Guess which one will spin like a top at the least bit of inattention? :wink:

As to the actual reason so many early planes were made ‘conventional’ was due to the fact there were far more unimproved places to fly from / to than clean paved airports. Strength and ease of construction, Plus propeller clearance were most of it. It was so important that many of the inline engines were set up as inverted engines ( Messy and with many problems) so as to get the most clearance for the propeller as in some models of the Fairchild-24, the BT-26 and other planes designed in the 30’s. Also the engines were mostly radials which meant the blades need to be longer for comparable HP engines because of the width of the engines were so big, and many aircraft used wooden propellers. Even metal props were slow to go to three or more blades due to the start of the art and the materials available at the time. ( there are always exceptions, 4 blade wood was seen on some of the early,big, multi-engined a/c of the day )

Not all t/w aircraft are hard to land. The little Stinson-10A ( 2 place, 65 HP, fabric ) was such that when it was time to land, the procedure was to close your eyes and pull the throttle to idle. That little plane would go find an airport and land by itself. A total delight to fly & it would make even a dead pilot look like a master of the Taildraggers…

Many WWII large aircraft were made with a t/w due to conditions they had to operate in.

In small single engine aircraft I prefer a t/w aircraft in really nasty cross wind conditions when I really have to land at THIS airport because that is my only choice due to fuel or weather, etc… I can land diagonally and run off into the grass or even land on the grass, cross the only runway at an angle and into the grass on the other side without damage to the aircraft and a tricycle geared a/c would be much more likely to be damaged.

22

Tail draggers are actually harder to land then when they were originally introduced because airports have changed. Instead of a straight line runway that is the norm today the early airports were designed as one open field (think circle or octagon). The pilot of a tail dragger always landed into the wind. There was no crosswind component.

23

The three-point attitude is pretty close to where the airplane will be if you stall the wings just slightly above the ground, i.e. at the slowest controllable airspeed. That speed (which implies the slowest groundspeed at touchdown, too) means the fastest transfer of weight from the wings to the wheels, the shortest rollout and the softest effects of hitting a bump or a rut.

A crosswind or gusty landing in a taildragger is often done in a “wheel landing”, with the tail held off until the mains are securely on. That permits a higher airspeed and groundspeed at landing, limiting the plane’s susceptibility to adverse wind, but requires a longer rollout.

Possibly the main factor in the change from tailwheel to tricycle gear was the widespread availability of longer paved runways during and shortly after WW2. On a rough dirt or grass strip, like they all used to be, a taildragger is far less likely to get stuck in or damaged by a rut - you can power your way out most of the time. A stuck nosewheel will just dig in deeper. With a paved surface, a tricycle gear is far superior, even if it has a little more weight and drag than a tailwheel configuration. You’ll only see the latter on a new plane if it’s high-performance/aerobatic, where that matters (and where prop clearance is a factor).

24

Thanks. I understand that. All I did initially was offer a simple explanation of why it is more difficult to take off and land in a taildragger. I thought anyone could understand the basic idea that is balancing on three wheels is easier than two. Since then, other posters, who offered very detailed, complete responses, disagreed with me, even though they concede that it is a fact. If you are only familiar with trigear you will need more advice and practice before switching to a taildragger than you would in the opposing situation. I did use a phrase that was a little ambiguous and might imply that 3 point landings were done with trigear, but I was actually referring to ground handling, on a paved runway. But I imagine that was far more detail than the OP was looking for.
It is always useful to have these discussions though. It’s just that in this case I don’t have anything to add or disagree with.

Perhaps you or the other esteemed aeronauts have an answer to this though:
I believe some said that taildraggers had less parasitic drag from the landing gear than trigears do. I only vaguely recall some sort of explanatation that having the gear much closer to the prop wash was the cause of the reduction in drag, and that some forward gear actually would induce more drag if not for the prop wash. Anybody know the details on that subject?

25

All pilots are trained and skilled at balancing an airplane on NO wheels. I have taken pilots with only power experience on glider rides, and none of them have had any trouble at all balancing on ONE wheel. In some ways it is easier…like when keeping a wing low for a crosswind landing.

Really, it is the backward-shopping cart directional instability that causes 99% of the trouble in taildraggers.

26

This… He nailed it…

27

Point 1: a typical nosewheel installation (e.g. Cessna 150) is much larger physically than the tailwheel installation on a similarly sized aircraft (e.g. Cessna 170). Not only larger, but of more complex cross section. Both of which are major contributors to form & parasite drag.

Point 2: Yes, the prop does accelerate airflow rearwards, so for an aircraft with a single-engine tractor configuration a nosegear would be exposed to a higher-speed relative wind than is a tailwhell, all else equal.
You’d need an aero engineer, not a pilot, to actually quantify the size of the two effects. But speaking as a non-aero-engineer pilot, my take is about 90/10 in favor of the larger size factor over the “propwash” factor.

And at idle in descent, the “propwash” factor would be negative; the airflow directly behind the prop disk is slower than the freestream.

And for a multi-engine or non-tractor configuration, the “propwash” factor would be non-existent.