Tailwheel endorsement

Took me 11 hours to solo, my (now) wife 7.
But we had a couple of advantages.
1. This was from scratch, no previous time at all.
2. Young, still in high school - that's worth a lot
3. My cost was $11 per hour, dual, wet. Solo was $7 per hour, wet.

Today (Dec 7) is the anniversary of my first flying lesson, 1958. So
10 times the price isn't far off.



In article 1070776484.626893@sj-nntpcache-3, "John Harper"
wrote:
It took me far too long to do it, because I had an instructor who was only
available for one week a month and whose technique, I realised late in
the game, was not really right for me. I'm writing the full story for my web
page. So it took me over 20 hours. A more reasonable time would probably
be about 10 hours. IIRC I was paying about $70/hr wet for the Citabria,
plus the instructor who was about $35 until I started working with my
acro instructor who is rather more expensive (and a lot better).

John

"pix" wrote in message
. ..
How much an hour did you pay for the endorsement, John? And how many hours
did it take you to do?

cheers...pix
who is thinking of getting a TW End.
"John Harper" wrote in message
news:1070762767.667218@sj-nntpcache-3...
Well, I finally got my tailwheel endorsement this week, and today was my
first solo tailwheel flight. I took the Decathlon, since I need to
practice
my landings. With my previous instrcutor I was struggling, in the
Citabria,
but my acro instructor took care of me and within three lessons I did
ten
good wheel-landings straight off, so I guess he must be doing something
right.

The Decathlon is a real fun plane to fly. It's great for acro, much
better
than the Grob I've been flying until recently. Landing is a bit of a
challenge, because the symmetrical wing means that lift drops off very
quickly at lower speeds. It hardly floats at all, in fact if you don't
keep
speed up on final it drops in like a brick.

Solo, it has pretty impressive performance. The take off run is over
before
you know it. On LVK's 5000' runway, I just about managed to get it to
pattern altitude before the opposite threshold, using a Vx (58 mph)
climb.

It's fun. It has been a struggle at times, especially when I was trying
to
conquer wheel landings with my first instructor. But in the end it's
been
worth it.

John