Course Overview and How to Use This Ground School

Welcome to the Tailwheel Endorsement ground school. I'm Captain Wade Holloway, and over the next several hours we're going to give you the knowledge foundation that makes your flight training faster, safer, and a lot more fun. Here's the thing about taildraggers: the airplane isn't harder to fly through the air than any other airplane — it's harder to manage on the ground. So most of this course lives in that critical zone between the runway and the air. We'll start with the single most important concept, the center of gravity behind the main wheels, and we'll keep coming back to it because it explains everything: ground loops, the active rudder, the sight picture, all of it. Then we'll build your aerodynamic toolkit — torque, P-factor, gyroscopic precession, and spiraling slipstream — the four left-turning tendencies that try to swing your nose on takeoff. From there we get into the heart of the course: taxiing, three-point landings, wheel landings, crosswind technique, and ground-loop recovery. We finish with the regulations, the 61.31(i) endorsement itself, and how checkouts and insurance work in the real world. Each lesson has key takeaways and there's a big bank of practice questions plus a final exam. Watch the order — the lessons build on each other. Treat this as the briefing you'd love to have had before lesson one. Let's get started.