Center of Gravity Drag Tail 
Pilot Institute
JUNE 4, 2025
Have you ever seen an airplane with no tail and no vertical fin, but with just a sleek wing? They prove that with the right aerodynamic tricks, you dont need a tail to fly. A tailless aircraft may still have a fuselage and a vertical tail (fin and rudder). How does the tail do this? Ever wondered how it stays balanced?
Pilot Institute
FEBRUARY 20, 2025
The problem is that the aileron can only be deflected to a point after which the drag becomes significant. Most of the ailerons mass lies behind the hinge, making it tail-heavy. Tail-heavy ailerons droop downwards when they arent being pulled by the control system. This shifts the ailerons Center of Gravity (C.G.)
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Flying Magazine
JULY 22, 2025
Over the years we’ve flown a lot of aircraft with “aft-tending” centers of gravity—if you filled the seats, you were outside the aft CG limit, and the rear seats in six-place airplanes were unusable. When that big Hartzell prop flattens out, it produces a lot of drag that lets one nicely fine-tune speed and rate of descent.
Pilot Institute
APRIL 12, 2025
The reaction in the form of increased thrust allows the aircraft to overcome drag and accelerate or climb. Helicopters use a small rotor mounted on the tail that produces sideways thrust to counter the main rotors torque reaction. The tail rotor pushes air to one side ( action ), and the tail moves the other way ( reaction ).
Pilot Institute
NOVEMBER 1, 2024
And ice doesn’t just make things slippery, it messes with the airflow over the wings, cuts down on lift, and ramps up drag. Remember that wings, propeller blades, and tail surfaces are airfoil-shaped. This leads to a serious loss of lift and an increase in drag. If you don’t act quickly, you’ll soon feel its effects.
Pilot Institute
MARCH 26, 2024
This tendency is due to their high center of gravity and heavy engine over the nose wheel. However, the increased drag might make it impossible to take off again. Make sure not to pull back too hard, or you could cause a tail strike. This does two things: it keeps the load on the wings and increases drag.
Vintage Aviation News
DECEMBER 14, 2024
One of the biggest challenges for the X-29 was the unusual center of gravity, which was affected by the rear-mounting of the forward-swept wings and made the X-29 inherently unstable. This was why the strakes were added to the X-29’s tail, in order to reduce drag from using the trim on the canard in the nose.
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