![\"Bri_Pawnee\"](\"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Bri_Pawnee.jpg\")
<\/a> \u00a0I guess that it\u2019s human nature to wonder which airplane holds a special place in the heart of a pilot.\u00a0 One of my readers sent an email, asking why I\u2019d never done an article about the PA25 Pawnee.<\/p>\nTo be honest, I rarely write about any one aircraft, primarily because I\u2019m not the technically minded type who deals with comparisons between airplanes.\u00a0 To me, although they have their differences, they are airplanes.\u00a0 To be more specific, they are TAILWHEEL airplanes and as such they tend to share a lot of characteristics, even if they have some that are unique to them.\u00a0 A great example is the Helio Courier.\u00a0 It has characteristics that make it very different from other airplanes.\u00a0 But it is in most ways the same.\u00a0 Its tailwheel version (the most common and the only one worth considering) behaves essentially the same as other tailwheel airplanes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good to remember all those things they have in common, because from time to time, a pilot may be called upon to fly an airplane for which there is only one seat.\u00a0 Two airplanes stand out in my mind in that regard.\u00a0 The first is the New Standard.\u00a0 Steve Oliver told me a few things about the airplane and then sent me off to \u201cshake hands\u201d with it and check myself out.\u00a0 I approached it with some trepidation, knowing that another pilot had gotten it on the ground and declared that there was something wrong with it.\u00a0 He declared that he was lucky to have gotten down in one piece.\u00a0 As Steve told me and I later found out for myself, the New Standard has a bit of a sluggish roll rate.\u00a0 Hmm, did I say \u201csluggish\u201d?\u00a0 Actually, you can measure its roll rate with a calendar!\u00a0 It\u2019s one of the very few airplanes in which this coordination snob will \u201clead with rudder\u201d when the roll rate fails to get me banked soon enough.\u00a0 That led rudder will skid the airplane through the air and cause its outside wings to momentarily have a bit more lift due to airspeed.\u00a0 Its roll rate will then increase for a moment.<\/p>\n
Single seat airplanes have that special aura which is the result of the fact that no one is going to fly with us.\u00a0 We have to hop in that seat and go \u201cshake hands\u201d with the airplane.\u00a0 The two of us will take to the air together and share a very private and special time as we find out about each other.<\/p>\n When Al Heuston casually waved his hand at his Pawnee and told me to go take it around the patch, I was delighted.\u00a0 I was also scared when I first plunked my butt down in that work-worn seat and surveyed the view of that long snoot for the first time. That experience is related in \u201cDebt to an Ag Pilot<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Its long snoot may be the first thing a flier notices about the Pawnee when he climbs in it.\u00a0 That snoot is LOOOOONG!\u00a0 It\u2019s long because there is a hopper right in front of the pilot, then a fuel tank, then the engine.\u00a0 The designers of ag planes have a daunting task when they plan these things.\u00a0 That hopper will hold hundreds of pounds of material when full, only their own weight when empty.\u00a0 This huge disparity in weight will cause tremendous variation in the center of gravity.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the pilot and the hopper sit so close together.\u00a0 They both must perch just as close to a calculated center of gravity as possible in order to enable the C.G. to remain within limits regardless of whether the plane is full or empty.\u00a0 So when old Fred Weick designed the Pawnee, he had some other issues.\u00a0 Let me inject a bit of opinion here:\u00a0 Weick is a designer who fascinates me because of the strong feelings I hold for two of his designs.\u00a0 He designed the Ercoupe.\u00a0 It is an aircraft that I loathe.\u00a0 Some of its owners are dear pals of mine.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s their airplane I don\u2019t like, not them.\u00a0 But Weick\u2019s Pawnee is a design I\u2019m crazy about.<\/p>\n When ol\u2019 Fred packaged all that airplane out in front of the pilot, he ended up with a long snoot that would blank out any view of the runway ahead.\u00a0 In order to make the view more clear, he drooped that snoot.\u00a0 As a result, when you sit in the Pawnee with its tailwheel on the ground, the top of that fuselage forward of the windshield is virtually level with the ground.\u00a0 That makes it possible to see where you\u2019re going.\u00a0 But when the airplane is in level flight, that snoot appears to be pointing way down.\u00a0 It\u2019s an \u201cobstacle conclusion\u201d (as they say in the south) which causes many a pilot to want to get the nose up.\u00a0 Not a good idea.<\/p>\n With that airplane seeming to point down, the pilot approaches the runway.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good thing that this long-snooted thing is so docile on the ground.\u00a0 The combination of the position of the gear and its design (good old Piper triangulated, bungee-equipped gear) cause the Pawnee to be an incredibly docile airplane with little tendency to want to ground-loop.\u00a0 But perhaps because of that drooping snoot, it has always seemed hard to land well.\u00a0 I flew my Pawnee virtually every day for three or four months a year.\u00a0 I wheeled it on and three-pointed it on. It was in the Pawnee that I practiced the shortest approaches I could fly, driving the airport managers nuts when I swooped past the front of the FBO, then banked steeply in a 180 to execute a landing in a turn as I rolled out of that 180. \u00a0As I told everyone who asked, in my opinion the Pawnee is an airplane which is EASY to land, but HARD to land well.\u00a0 I loved my Pawnee.\u00a0 I loved its big ol\u2019 O-540 engine.\u00a0 I loved the power with which it could hoist a 2-32 with three people into the air.\u00a0 I loved its visibility and the ease with which I could fly formation and some other maneuvers (I can\u2019t be specific until the statute of limitations kicks in).\u00a0 I loved the smell of the remains of Malathion and who-knows-what-other chemicals lingering in its bones And I can\u2019t deny that perhaps a part of its charm is the fact that the Pawnee is a working airplane.\u00a0 No dilettante\u2019s plaything, the Pawnee was built to do a job.\u00a0 It did that job well and, as one of the most popular glider tugs,\u00a0 now continues to work, doing a job that ol\u2019 Fred may not have even envisioned when he was scratching his head over the assignment of stations for that big load of poison.\u00a0 And while Mister Weick worked out all those issues, he also designed this plane to crash.\u00a0 He knew that an ag plane had another, most important job: It must protect its pilot if it crashed.\u00a0 And as an ag plane, it\u2019s chances of crashing were excellent indeed.\u00a0 So he made that fuselage bowed out in just the right places in order to absorb energy and keep that pilot as safe as he could.<\/p>\n Yup, the Pawnee will always be one of my favorite airplanes, for a variety of reasons.\u00a0 I hope that there will be another one in my future. Because some of my happiest swooping was in the PA-25 Pawnee.<\/p>\n Brian<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “…as an ag plane, it\u2019s chances of crashing were excellent indeed. “<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[35,67,125,127,171,174,178],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/a> and wafting from its snoot into mine.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always wished that older airplanes could talk.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to listen to the stories they could tell.\u00a0 In the Pawnee\u2019s case, they would be stories about untold hours of routine passes over fields, punctuated with hair-raising moments and accidents both humorous and tragic.<\/p>\n