When I first began taking flight instruction, I started in a Decathalon. (It's a tubby, awkward-looking little plane, tracing its ancestry back to the Aeronca Champ, having more power and aerobatic ability.) My instructor didn't say anything about it being a taildragger, or anything particular about it compared to tricycle gear airplanes, we just got in and started flying. It was only after I returned years later to flying, that getting into a taildragger converted Cessna Aerobat that it suddenly seemed tricky or demanding. And before we went, there was a little ground school, with a diagram of where the center of gravity is with respect to the location of the wheels. It dawned on me that a shopping cart analogy was a good one. You push a shopping cart forward around the store and let go of it, it just keeps going. Push one around backwards and let go, however, and watch that cart whip right around as soon as you let go of it. Since I've been flying the 170, I just think of it that way. If you try it with the shopping cart, you have to make those same twitchy adjustments to the "tail" to keep it going straight, and if it's filled with groceries, it wants to keep swinging out just that much more. I took my whole family up one day. Car seats, diaper bag, everybody piled in there. I figured we were still 200 pounds under gross weight even with full fuel, but damn if that thing wasn't a completely different airplane. That's the chapter I'm in right now- that time after you get your license, where you discover these things, often quite risky things, that you'd never find out during your training.
Like figuring it's okay to take off downwind with full fuel, out of Anguin on a 90 degree afternoon. It was a very light tailwind, and I was flying solo, so I wasn't exactly heavily loaded, but I can tell you now, it wasn't okay. I was looking at the airspeed, flying at best rate of climb, or steepest climb, or whatever I thought would work best, but the trees were still passing under me awfully close. A couple people in the plane with me and I wouldn't be writing this. The irony of it is that I'm only now figuring out how to fly in and out of higher strips, with bigger payloads. And that is exactly what the license allows you to do: fly your friends to new exciting places, but you never really do that when you're in training.
