I can only relate my peronsal experience. I wanted to try a tail dragger a few years ago, but was a bit apprehensive because everyone talked about how they were harder and you had to worry about ground loops and nose overs and other stuff. So I bought a battered up old super sportster arf off ebay to practice on. I was surprised that all I had to do was gun the throttle, steer a tiny bit, and take offs were a complet non-event ... I thought it tracked a lot straighter than my old sweet stik trike ... although that had the gear bent everywhich way on it over the years so nothing was straight anymore.

Since then I've flown an UltraSport 40, a tiger bipe, and the Kadet Senior you mention ... all tail draggers. For something with long moments and the main gear pretty far forward, ground handling has been completely reasonable ... you just steer like you would any plane on take off and you zip down the runway and take off. Likewise landings have been no problem either. I've been able to *induce* a ground loop on the super sportster, but I actually had to work pretty hard to make that happen.

I have seen some R/C tail draggers that are a real handful, so the people that talk about problems and issues are also correct ... a small pits with about 2x too much power, a decathelon, and a cub ... all were nearly impossible to get airborn ... but the Kadet Senior is no problem, I would happily recommend it tin a tail dragger configuration to someone who is comforatable flying tricycle gear airplanes.

You asked about preference ... I just thought the wire tricycle gear that comes stock with the Kadet looked really spindly and ugly... I imagined it vibrating over the bumps and generally looking really obnoxious. As soon as that picture entired my head, I knew I would have to convert mine to a taildragger with more solid aluminum main gear. I think the Kadet looks ****much**** better as a tail dragger. This isn't a scale airplane, but it looks (and can be made to fly) very scale like.

I would also point out that I chose a 4 stroke engine (ASP/Magnum 61). This led me down a cascading chain of events where I ended up with the engine mounted inverted (as the only way I could get the throttle in a place where I could run the linkage to it without drilling holes through my tank.) But this put the cylinder head and carb right where the nose wheel mount was supposed to go ... so in the end I would have had to convert to a tail dragger anyway.

If you get to the point of actually going forward with this project, let me know and I can go measure the gear dimensions I chose and you can adjust to your own taste from there.

And your point about a relaxing flyer is absolutely correct. The Kadet is such an immense pleasure to fly, I still have traces of a smile left over from my flying session yesterday. One thing that has been really fun with this airplane is slips. The Kadet floats so much on landing approach that I've been starting to use a slip on the down wind and base and even final approach legs of my pattern to bleed off extra altitude. I'm a mediocre pilot, but I'm starting to get the hang of doing slips in the Kadet and I can do them now with out going all wobbly.

I don't think the question should be tricycle vs. tail dragger, but instead should be how exactly is the best way to rig up a steerable tail wheel? My choice of putting a little servo in the tail works great, but I ended up with 10.5 oz of lead added to the nose to get it balance ... :-( On the other hand, with the Kadet Senior, an extra pound of weight is about as unnoticable as an extra pound on Kirs------ you know I was going to pick on Kirstie Alley here ... but that would probably be in bad taste so maybe I'll leave the sentence incomplete. :-)

Regards,

Curt.