The A9E1 borrowed as many featured from the previous light tank Mark III, parts and equipment commercially available, to reduce the conception costs. The Cruiser Mark I was at its origins a "cheap" medium tank, comparable to the contemporary Infantry tank Matilda Mark I. You have to remember what your feet are for and know how to dance.The Cruiser Mark I designed by John Carden As always, any pilot has to do what he thinks is best or the situation dictates, especially tailwheel pilots. The majority of them have figured it out and will do wheel landings unless there is a soft field situation. In a three point, full stall landing you are always “chasing” the touch down point (and it’s harder to see over the nose) Before I start a big “I know better” conversation here, all you need to do is take a look at an experienced Alaskan bush pilot. The idea is that you can control the exact touch down point and all the weight is on the mains so you get max braking authority. The only time they three point a tailwheel airplane is in a soft field landing situation. They do more back woods short/rough field lands in a day than some do in a lifetime. Their philosophy for 99% of landings are wheel landings and they seem to have it figured out. It will take time and learning the hard way to rebuild institutional knowledge and, as others have pointed out, jet fighter pilots get out of the habit of using their rudders (we’ve seen it in the A-29 and AT-6 programs).įull stall landings with a tailwheel airplane are great under most circs, however I had the opportunity to fly with an instructor with about 10k hours in 180/185s as an instructor for the Mission Aviation Fellowship. Nobody in USAF has flown a taildragger in decades. It’s got a lot of torque, and it will be operated in some pretty sketchy locations and conditions. That said, there *will* be ground accidents. So the AT can deliver most of the same munitions but with a much smaller footprint, based even closer to the fight, at 1/5th the operating cost.įor small, unimproved airstrips, the tailwheel can be a benefit–that’s why bush planes are almost always tail draggers. Perhaps most importantly, the A-10 costs more than $10k/hr to operate while the AT-802 probably runs about $2k/hr. The AT can loiter for hours without air refueling. The A-10 can’t operate out of a 25×1000-ft dirt or grass strip, both in terms of takeoff/landing performance and also ground bearing pressure (probably about 3x higher for the A-10 than the AT-802). It’s a counter-terrorism/insurgency platform, not a tank-buster–you don’t need a 30 mm cannon or 2000 lb Mk-84s to kill Toyota Hilux pickup trucks and mud huts. The AT-802 isn’t intended to replace the A-10. It’s not “new and shiny”–the fighter mafia hates turboprops. It’s commonly-held misconceptions like these that are probably the reason that USAF “faltered along the way” (words of AF Times) on light attack/armed overwatch acquisition. “Tailwheel aircraft are more prone to rotational forces around their center of gravity, due to location in relation to main gear.” “What this means is that during taxi, takeoff and landing operations, pilots need to be more cognizant of aircraft alignment and crosswinds,” said AFSOC spokesperson Lt. Developing a training protocol will be a focal point as the aircraft moves toward deployment. 元Harris teamed with Air Tractor to offer the aircraft, which will be newly designated as the OA-1K. The chapter on the art and wisdom of landing and taking off with a tailwheel was deleted from military training manuals. After 1945, virtually all jet fighters were nosewheel-configured. We haven’t operated, at scale, a taildragger aircraft in quite some time.” Of course, most of the fighters from World War II were taildraggers, virtually a necessity to accommodate the large-diameter propellers driven by the high-power piston inline and radial engines of the day. Jim Slife said, “We’re going to have to pay a lot of attention to training on this.
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