On Tuesday, 15 May 2018 19:30:07 UTC+8, Peter F wrote:
If your pupills are regularly approaching with full brake then they need to
improve their circuit planning rather than changing airbrake setting at
lowish level.

The last thing they should be doing is getting into the habit of
approaching too high / too fast then reducing brake. This will eventually
lead to them running into the hedge of a short field when outlanding

Regards

PF

OK, I think I need to re-phrase my question .. I understand everything you're saying (I'm an experienced instructor) but my question is not about how to teach circuits/approaches/landings it's whether anyone else flying performance "training" gliders like the DG-1000 has had lot's of student tail-strikes, and whether there is any merit in reducing the airbrake to avoid the need for a tail-first high rate of descent landing?

We have 2 DG-1000's - an older tail-dragger with a high undercarriage which lands only slightly tail-first in a fully held-off low energy landing, and a newer nose-wheel version with a lower height main wheel which seems to land much harder on the tail - hence a possible problem with bursting tail wheels when a student lands heavy from correcting an overshoot with nearly full air-brake - we just had our first one.

I suspect that the new nose wheel configuration DG-1000 has a lower wing incidence wing than most traditional trainers (for performance) & with the deletion of the original high main wheel configuration this has now resulted in an aircraft more susceptible to hard tail-strikes .. and as we have purchased it as a primary trainer I'm trying to determine if we need to restrict the amount of air-brake used by students when correcting overshoots in order to avoid tail-strikes/burst tail-wheels. We have a long runway, so it would just mean a long push-back with lots of time to debrief what went wrong with the overshoot!