I recently got the following email from a guy named Steve. Here is Steve's initial email followed by my reply and his angry response:
Since 1965 some kid reporter for Plane and Pilot started calling tailwheel aircraft taildraggers.. cutsey and catchy but very incorrect.. hate to see you boys still calling tailwheel aircraft with brakes taildraggers, a term reserved for tail skid aircraft with no brakes...check your history before trying to rewrite it...
My reply:
Steve, Regardless of where it originated, "taildragger" is firmly rooted in the aviation lexicon now as a well know and accepted term for describing airplanes with a tailwheel. A quick Google search shows literally thousands of resources from magazines like AOPA Pilot and Flying to all kinds of web sites and books and so forth using the term. Thanks for the info. Jeff
Steve's response:
Jeff, It is not "firmly rooted" in the FAA Regulations!.. in fact your slang term is not mentioned in the regs or AIM at all!.. expected a weeny response from you.. people like you are the problem and propagating this to sites like Google.. it's probably all about money with you and not about using proper descriptions and respect.. the slang "taildragger" was coined in a negative article by a private pilot who had trouble flying a tailwheel aircraft.. tens of thousands of pilots that fly or have flown an AT6, P51, DC3, D18, Cessna 140,170,180,195, Swift, Luscombe, Stearman etc., which do require some skill, upon hearing the slang "taildragger", think immediately that the person saying it has little respect for the Classics and probably is afraid of them or can't fly them correctly... Jeff, I respect your right to make money but not by seemingly disrespecting tailwheel aircraft and the pilots that fly them.. Respectfully, Steve
My View
I don't think Steve was being respectful at all, and I replied and stood up for my self. As most of you know, this web site is just a hobby. I have some links to books and some ads here now, but I'm lucky to get $10 a month which hardly covers the $20 a month hosting fee. I took issue with the personal nature of Steve's attack, but offered to put his argument here on the web site...he wasn't interested. I thought it might make for a good discussion anyway, so here it is. I provided numerous links to books, videos, business, and web sites using the term "taildragger". I searched Google hard for any evidence of the term having negative connotations or origins and found nothing. Steve just kept making personal digs and accusations and didn't want to have an honest debate on the issue. The truth is that the term "taildragger" is affectionately used and understood by everyone today.
If Steve's assertion to the origin of the term is correct, I'd love to know! What a great bit of trivia that would be, but that's all it would be - trivia. Maybe the article existed, but if so Steve is probably giving the "kid reporter" undeserved credit, and we have certainly won since today the term is fully established as a positive one in aviation jargon. No one using the term today is disrespecting tailwheel aircraft or the pilots that fly them.
That's my view...what's yours? I would love to hear your feedback and will post some of it here on this page as I have time.
Send your comments to me at contact@taildraggers.com or send me suggestions for future issues you would like to see here.
Jeff
Comments...
Wonder what [Steve's] real problem is. In the FAA regs there are proberly several terms that have slang words in the real pilot world. Bet he is also a member of the ACLU. - Robert (8/23/08)
I agree with Robert....must be more here than meets the eye. Personally I see nothing but a term of endearment in the word "taildragger", regardless of it's technical merit or the historical accuracy of it's use. According to Steve I probably should not have named my C-195 "Big Squirrelly", (although she is!) as it would be derogatory. A quote from the movie "Stripes": "lighten up, Francis!" - Alan (8/27/08)
To each his own. I never cared for the term myself. To me, its use denotes a lack of aeronautical knowledge and historical perspective. But then I'm a guy that tends to rearrange the cutlery at my place setting if its not "square" with the table. - Waldo (9/6/08)
I own a taildragger with a wheel at the back, and brakes... English is an evolving language, what once may have been a term strictly reserved for brake and tailwheel-less aircraft has now become a widely accepted, and therefore acceptable use of the term. Thanks for the site, and for keeping the art of taildragger flying known ;-) - Etienne, South Africa (9/18/08)
If I had to strictly limit my jargon to FAA Reg lingo my wife and kids wouldn't understand me...I wouldn't understand me. Just for the record I've spent a good chunk of my life as a mechanic/pilot in Alaska and I don't know anyone who says "conventional landing gear". I sawed off a nose wheel on my 172 and glued it on the back and looks like a taildragger to me. - Will (9/19/08)
They are also called conventional gear airplanes. Taildragger works for me. Language is a fluid thing and any pilot I know would understand what you meant when you say taildragger. (note: once upon a time the word computer refered to a person) - Burt (10/08/08)
Steve admonished you to "check your history before trying to rewrite it..." As a professional historian who does both for a living (that is, "rewrite history" and "check the facts" before attempting to do so), I can report that my research to date reveals no negative connotations attached to the term "taildragger."
However, this does not necessarily mean that Steve is wrong. He asserts that "the slang 'taildragger' was coined in a negative article by a private pilot who had trouble flying a tailwheel aircraft...tens of thousands of pilots that fly or have flown an AT6, P51, DC3, D18, Cessna 140,170,180,195, Swift, Luscombe, Stearman etc., which do require some skill, upon hearing the slang 'taildragger', think immediately that the person saying it has little respect for the Classics and probably is afraid of them or can't fly them correctly...." It would be most helpful to my research if Steve could provide some concrete leads regarding the "tens of thousands of pilots" whom he claims that "upon hearing the slang 'taildragger', think immediately that the person saying it has little respect for the Classics...." If evidence of this exists, then I'd love to see it.
I did find Steve's notes regarding to the origins of the term taildragger (as a negative term applied to tailwheel aircraft) somewhat useful. I wish he had been more specific by providing author's name and which issue of Plane & Pilot this article appeared in. But his statement: "Since 1965 some kid reporter for Plane and Pilot started calling tailwheel aircraft taildraggers..." at least gives me something to go on when I get back to the archives in a few weeks.
Unfortunately, this still leaves open the question of whether the term "taildragger" really is perceived, either by those who use it OR by those who hear it (aside from Steve), as a negative term. I must reiterate that I have seen nothing in my fairly extensive research on the subject (including hundreds of hours spent in the archives of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum), nor have I ever heard anything in my 24 years as an active pilot (including a tailwheel endorsement in 1985 and about 150 hours in recent years keeping a Citabria going more or less straight down the runway, knock-on-wood), to indicate that pilots who use the term "taildragger" do so out of disrespect for pilots who fly an aircraft equipped with conventional landing gear.
Of course, history is often complicated, and the more you learn, the more you realize just how much you DON'T know. For instance, for about two decades, starting in the mid-1950s when a middle-aged lawyer-turned-pilot declared that tricycle gear was "the best innovation since the wired brassiere" (Frank Kinston Smith, Week-End Pilot, New York: Random House, 1957), and ending by the mid-1970s when a former ATC pilot who flew "the hump" during WWII wrote an article titled "Taming the Taildragger" (Don Downie, "Taming the Taildragger: Toil, Tears, and Sweat - but Worth the Trouble," AOPA Pilot, September 1975), my research indicates that tailwheel airplanes (and their pilots) were indeed the butt of jokes. My evidence does not (so far) include negative use of the term "taildragger." Instead, it comes from a variety of other sources. For instance, aviation cartoons during this 20-year period often depicted tailwheel aircraft as old-fashioned and decrepit, and their pilots as poor hayseeds who clearly cannot afford a shiny new (tricycle gear) airplane. The same perception, though harder to find, is buried deep within articles & letters from pilots regarding flight schools, rental fleets, etc. that imply one can judge the quality of a flight school based on the quality -- and age -- of the aircraft tied up along the flight line. In these cases, the sources indicate that a line of tired old ragwing Cubs and Champs indicates a second- or third-rate outfit, whereas a spiffy fleet of new tricycle gear trainers is a good sign that it's a first-rate operation.
This trend seemed to reach its height in the mid-1960s, right around the time when Steve indicates that "taildragger" first appeared as a derisive term in the pages of Plane & Pilot. So he could very well be correct about this 20 year period from 1955 to 1975. But I can say with some certainty that from 1975 onward, while there's been a lot written about tailwheel airplanes, including plenty of debates, I have seen no one use the term "taildraggers" in a derogatory manner.
This leads me to conclude one of the following:
(1) Perhaps Steve IS right, and both Jeff and I have been looking in the wrong places and talking to the wrong people. If so, please send some leads in the form of references to articles, letters to the editor published in aviation magazines, etc. I don't even need copies or scanned images of the actual sources unless they are really obscure. Just give me the author's name, the magazine or journal title, and date of publication (or some other way of tracking it down) and I'll do the footwork.
(2) Perhaps Steve WAS right regarding the negative connotations of the term during the mid-1960s, but he hasn't kept up with the times. This is what my evidence seems to indicate, which means I have to come down squarely on Jeff's side and agree that "Regardless of where it originated, 'taildragger' is firmly rooted in the aviation lexicon now as a well known and accepted term for describing airplanes with a tailwheel." This said, if Steve (or anyone else) can "show me the sources," then I will be happy to further revise my "revisionist history."
Many thanks,
Alan - (12/01/08)