Since nobody has picked this nit: place the tail down gently but positively.
I think his instructor is being too hard on him. Wheel landings should be left until everything else is mastered. Three-pointers is what he should be getting.
The wing on a Citabria has its chordline at 12° to the ground surface. I measured it. Stall is at about 17°. In the flare for a three-point, the aircraft is travelling nearly level to the surface, so the wing is nowhere near stall. Aircraft designers don't want the wing stalling in the flare; that raises the possibility of a wing- or nose-drop. Flaring high and plonking down hard is due to sink, not stall. "Full-stall" landings are not full stall.
More like pushing down on the tail, which can’t go down any further because of the earth, doesn’t allow an increase in AOA, while the drag of the tailwheel reduces airspeed, reducing lift at the same AOA.
And that is a function of scarcity, not that one technique is better or worse.
If a technique is more likely to break something, wouldn’t that make it worse?
Not necessarily. If I was going to be in an unplanned field in a 180 or 185, I'm probably three-pointing it anyway and taking the risk on that 5K part.
OP said it was a Decathlon which has a different wing. It may have the same angle of incidence but it has a slightly higher stall speed. Not sure why his instructor wants him to learn wheel landings first, in most small GA taildraggers there's never any actual need to do wheel landings other than to keep the tailwheel off of rocks. The tail has to come down sooner or later, no getting around that. I originally learned to fly in a J3 Cub and though it was over 60 years ago I don't recall there being any todo about wheel landings, not sure if we ever actually even did them to be honest.
It's hard to. That horizontal stab and elevator are in pretty strong ground effect in the three-point attitude, and you don't have enough pitch control to force the tail lower unless the CG is way aft.
That $5k part is cheap compared to the tailwheel itself. When I retired six years ago, the locking McCauley tailwheel assembly for the 185 was $13K.
But they are also dirt cheap to replace. About 200 bucks for a Decathlon the last time I bought a set.
A higher stall speed at the same incidence implies a lower stall angle. Maybe 15 or 16° instead of 17°.
Crosswinds. It's easier to get down safely in a crosswind with a wheel landing. You are touching down at a higher airspeed, which means that the relative wind is coming at you from a lesser angle, more from ahead, and yaw control is better. Get the upwind main on, hold lots of aileron into the wind, then as speed decays the downwind wheel touches, still with lots of aileron, and then the tail has to come down as the rudder loses authority and you need the tailwheel.
Part of the Citabria preflight was to check the distance between the tailwheel and the bottom of the rudder. I recall that less than one “hand’s width” was when spring replacement started to become prudent.
Yup. The incandescent landing lights were rated for 25 operating hours. For a while I was getting as little as four hours out of them, but that was in the vibrating 172 cowlings. The LED lights fixed that. And the students and instructors loved them.
I told the instructors and students that I wanted to know immediately when the tailwheel started to shimmy. It's primarily dynamic imbalance, but I dynamically balanced those tailwheels. When they shimmied after that, it was due to the tailspring flattening out and tilting the tailwheel pivot axis forward of vertical. That shimmy will fatigue and break a Citabria's tailpost. BTDT. Expensive.
Ask 10 instructors and you'll get 10 different answers to that.
The castering lock. They break when shimmy is tolerated for too long. They also chew up the inside of the steering arm during shimmy. I never liked the Scott tailwheels. Expensive, and the "shimmy damper" is basically a disc brake that makes precise steering difficult. The McCauley lockable wheel at least had some shimmy brake adjustment to it, but it was much more expensive than the expensive Scott.
This is a key point and I believe many times pilots learning to fly tailwheel are led astray by the whole "dancing on the pedals" thingy. I've had landings where it took a good bit of footwork to keep the tail behind the nose and others where I hardly needed to move the rudder pedals at all. Just need to give the plane what it needs to do what you want it to do ...
Maule is the same way, although they say it IS difficult to wheel land, as the main gear are further forward than a lot of taildraggers. Somewhere I’ve probably still got a fax from Ray Maule stating that they recommend against wheel landings per 61.31(i).
The little turd.
My habit is to do two landings, one of each type, every time I arrive at my home drome.
I have long held that, no matter how good you are at something, there is a 12-year-old girl somewhere out there who is better than you. Sometimes, the 12-year-old girl is your 2-1/2-year-old nephew.my nephew managed to pull off a perfect one when he was 2 1/2.
