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Buying Tailwheel: Leave Your Ego Home

Tailwheel ownership can be amazingly rewarding, but making a purchase decision in haste can be a financial nightmare or even kill you.

A Piper Super Cub in its natural habitat, a backcountry airstrip. Admit it, aren’t you feeling a bit envious right now?

Yes, of course, you can buy and happily fly a tailwheel airplane. They aren’t magic, although some of them are so charismatic that they come close. Plus, there is the cool factor associated with them and the oft-heard but most definitely not true phrase—you aren’t a real pilot unless you can fly tailwheel airplanes.

Unfortunately, the cool factor of tailwheel airplanes has a way of causing pilots to make purchase decisions even more irrationally than they do with nosewheel airplanes. It might be a good idea to devote a branch of psychiatry to a study of tailwheel airplane purchase decisions. Sadly, a subbranch might be included to look into the effect of testosterone poisoning on those purchase decisions as well as operations that immediately follow the phrase, “Watch this y’all!”

Rick Durden

Senior Editor Rick Durden has written for Aviation Consumer since 1994 and specializes in aviation law. Rick is an active CFII and holds an ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation. He is the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2.