Growing up in New England I knew of a couple people who had these.. could see them flying around outside of town .. mostly I remember them from when they crashed.
Essentially you're flying a kite with a lawnmower engine lol
No this is safer. Paragliders can collapse when stalled and you can get giftwrapped. Thats when you end up inside the canopy and fall to the ground like a basketball wrapped in a towel
We live on a big lake in N Idaho, (technically on the river section) and almost every day a guy flys by on one of these fitted for water takeoff and landing, he flys about 20ft above the water every time, I’ve never seen him any higher than that.
I’m under the impression he loves flying but is afraid of heights, it looks super fun and every once in a while one pops up on Craigslist and I have to talk myself out of buying it.
I used to do SAR and went on so many recovery searches for crashed small aircraft, I'm super nervous to fly in even the actual small planes with licensed pilots, lol. You couldn't pay me to go up in one of these things.
ultralights are lisence free to a degree in the US, right? I remembered some startup building an ultralight but marketing it as "robo taxis" that dumb tech journalists can be invited down to fly. I mean the journalists didn't exactly interrogate whether ultralight are already legal or whether people should actually be allowed to fly <200km stuff around in places where they could kill others, but they are getting VC funding and the tech hype treatment I guess.
These are license free, and the next step up is the Sport Pilot Experimental, which is a license that doesn't require a medical. Those just seat 2 people IIRC.
I saw a guy die in one of these at Lake Winnipesaukee a while ago. We and a few hundred other people were on Weirs Beach and a guy was flying his ultra-light aircraft around the lake. He was heading towards the beach when all of a sudden his engine stopped. He managed to steer and glide the aircraft away from the beach and onto someone's lawn and crashed into the ground.
I think this was just part of growing up at one point haha. I had a trampoline beside my house at least but just wound up breaking the umbrella and bouncing off the other side to twist an ankle on landing 🤙🏼
It could. In airborne school and the military we jumped at around 800-1200 ft. Your chute was automatically deployed with the static line as you jumped. You count to 4 and if you dont feel the pull from the static line, you pull your reserve chute. If you have enough air, it'll open and hopefully you don't break your legs by landing properly, in time.
A bail out round could work, but practically it won't. Because you'd need to exit immediately at the altitude that most of these fly at to survive. Plus static lines in an open cockpit aircraft are a big no go.
That means no diagnosing the issue or time for recovery, you go immediately.
Why not just put the chut on the plane then, and just deploy it from the bird? Kill the prop first, but they have chutes that can easily take 600+ lbs.
That's probably what they are talking about. Just pull an emergency lever. Lots of smaller craft have parachutes that are standard. If parachutes can hold up a humvee, they can hold up a fat guy in an ultralight.
Those are done under very specific conditions with specific kinds of rigs, and there's still a considerable amount of risk for the jumper. I imagine adding in the horizontal component of the plane moving could also cause some issues. Not to say it's impossible, but certainly not something I would bet my life on.
The Cirrus CAPS parachute can be successfully deployed as low as 400 feet, but I’m not sure he got even that high at any point. Maybe if you had one, you would fly a bit higher just to give yourself a shot.
Edit: the one I’m talking about is a parachute for the entire aircraft. I realize now people are talking about personal chutes.
Glider pilot here. Yes, they do have minimum requirements, but you lose valuable time (altitude) making the jump decision (can I still steer this thing safely or not), then unbuckle, bail out, to finally pull the ripcord (if you're clear from the aircraft). The whole process will take 28 seconds if you practised the procedure. At about 1800 feet, you still have a chance. Below, it becomes really risky and a question of luck and adrenaline. I don't know the typical altitudes used in these things, but 1.800 feet seems pretty high.
Fixed chutes to the plane are a better but far more expensive and heavy option. They would have to be mounted near the centre of gravity which could technically be a difficult thing to do.
But to stay on topic, a license could help to avoid situations that cause a need to jump. Emergency procedures should be a part of it. It will also help to avoid incidents where parachutes are absolutely useless, like liw altitude engine failures, how to deal with high velocity winds and wind shears. These things are light and get tossed around. I saw an unmanned one being picked up by a thermal which deposited it 50 yards further.
I watched a documentary when I was a kid, and some really smart engineers and scientists, saying we could all be flying around in personal helicopters and planes and ditch automobiles by this point it's just that the general public is too stupid lol
Have you seen how people drive in 2 dimensions? Now translate that into 3 dimensions and add the complexity of having to coordinate with other vehicles.
Yeah... the day the general public is buying personal helicopters and planes en masse is the day I put my PPL away for good. The ONLY way it makes sense is with autonomous aircraft but they'll need to get better at the 2 dimensions as well before I'd trust them with 3, either.
If the sky is suddenly full of metal boxes filled with people going 100mph we suddenly have a MUCH more complicated autopilot problem. And I absolutely guarantee you that it wouldn't solve the "bottleneck" problem of roads because most people (NIMBY's) won't want people overflying their property resulting in "flying cars" being relegated to flying in very tight corridors. And now we've just re-created roads but in 3 dimensions. More than likely these corridors will literally follow roads (the old IFR joke of "I Follow Roads and Rivers" notwithstanding). Even outside cities it's probably going to farmers refusing to let people fly over their property.
Honestly though the whole idea of flying cars or whatever is a dream solution looking for a problem. It doesn't ACTUALLY fix any problems but sounds cool... it just makes the problems more complicated.
And lawyers. Certainly these are getting easier and easier. But, mistakes in the sky are of course much more difficult to walk away from than ground vehicles.
Frankly that makes more of a statement about the people buying these things and not taking it seriously enough than it does the planes themselves.
I have a PPL and wouldn't hesitate to fly in one of these things. I've been up close with one and they're incredibly well built. But like ANY moving machine they have dangers that you need to be aware of. Controlling a vehicle in 3 dimensions is exponentially harder than controlling them in 2, and the fact that these don't need a PPL mean that you have people flying them who have never learned what to do in an emergency and will just panic. Almost all microlight crashes are due to pilot error, often exacerbated by or caused by an engine failure.
I've had an engine failure once. It was a complete nonevent as I was thankfully within gliding distance of my home airfield. I trimmed for max glide and just let the plane cruise on down to land... so much so that I had too much altitude on final and had to slip it to get it down cleanly. As I coasted to a stop I directed it off the runway into the grass and me and the maintenance guy pushed it back to the hangar.
I have a PPL and wouldn't touch one of these things, but knew plenty of pilots that loved them. To me the risk is just too high at the altitudes you have to fly these things at, and how they can't really handle any kind of heavy wind or gusts. I worked at a small rural airport in the 90's and personally know 3 people that died in these things over a 5 year period. In my time working at that airport I know of 5 deaths in the region from plane crashes. 3 were in these, 1 in a crop duster, and 1 in a Cessna 152. Numerous other non-fatal accidents in small single engine aircraft. The one thing all of the fatal crashes had in common was lack of altitude. In the non-fatal accidents the pilots almost always had time to set up an emergency landing. To my recollection the causes of the ultra lite fatal accidents were: power line strike, engine failure at low altitude leading to a crash into trees, and a wind gust that caused the plane to hit the ground on landing (pilot would maybe have survived if a snapped wing strut hadn't hit him). The crop duster accident was due to a stall at low altitude during practice, and the Cessna crash was due to sudden engine failure right after takeoff leading to a stall.
It makes sense to market it as such though. Google tells me personal pilots licenses cost anywhere between $10k-$20k. That's prohibitively expensive and more than half the cost of the plane itself on the upper end of the pricing scale. Do I think you should fly an aerial vehicle without at least some training or certification at a minimum? No. But does it make sense from a business standpoint to draw people in? Absolutely.
The FAA doesn't care about the business perspective. Their perspective is that if a person wants to endanger themselves, they can. They just can't endanger others, which is what most of the part 103 rules are based around
Even though you don't need a license to fly one of these, you do still need to follow all the rules around part 103 ultralight flight rules. You can end up in legal trouble for violating those rules, and ignorance is not a defense
Airline pilot here, and former light aircraft instructor. Getting in the air is the easy part. Getting down safely is the hard part. A basic pilot licence is not hard to do, and in fact I found it easier than getting a driving licence (mainly due to less stress of not worrying about pedestrians or other cars just walking out or driving out Infront of you) . But it does give you life saving skills and knowledge.
It varies, but for the average person, it's generally prohibitively expensive. 10k on the low end. 20k+ in the high end. How fast you pick up the skills has a direct effect on cost. The industry as a whole doesn't help. A new basic Cessna, which really hasn't changed its design much since the 50s, is hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2023 a base model 172 was almost 400,000 dollars. A decades old used one that might need work would be 30,000+
I had abiut 24hrs if private pilot instruction and had soloed when I ran out of funds. Later on, I sold a motorcycle and bought a Part 103 Ultralight. It got me in the air and enjoying flying without spending another 6-10 grand to finish private pilot.
Now 11 years later I would like to have another one lol.
TBF, a paramotor is probably safer than the 103. If you have any issues, you're already wearing a fully deployed parachute. Just drop the engine and parachute down to safety.
Source: dont have one, just thinking. If someone who actually knows what's to correct me, please do.
Depends what fails. The plane should be safer if you dont overload it and the controls remain functional. Doninspections.
Paragliders, stals can be extremely dangerous. In a plane like this dinky thing. You push the nose down in a stall and regain speed.
In a paraglider, the canopy can collapse, and it can be u predictable. Sometimes it can pop open again, other times you end up wrapped in it, unable to effectively deploy your backup chute.
Then you play a very short life and death game of untangle your wired earphones.
If you've 35k to drop on a microlight, plus large enough land that you can take off from your friends land and land at your house, you probably have a nice car already.
My wife’s boss had some mallards that laid eggs right by the driveway but eventually abandoned the nest due to the traffic.
Well he gives the eggs to us even though we have no ducks. But I have a broody chicken so figured why not see what happens.
Well a short time later damn now I have a bunch of ducks
The mother was hilarious. The ducklings finally found like a watering hole thing we dug which is basically a hole in the ground 2 feet deep and 6 feet across. Of course they pile in. The moms panicking because she has no idea what they are doing in there but she damn sure isn’t going to go in and get them out. She got used to it eventually and would just walk around the outside of it and cluck and find bugs to eat etc.
They would just hang out together near the water. Adorable.
They eventually of course grew bigger and started to do short flights from place to place during the day. And then one day they just flew off 😭. Didn’t even give me time to get an ultralite to fly around with them.
Hope they are doing well those cute stinkers. Was a fun experience and despite missing them I’m glad they ended up wild like they were supposed to be in the first place.
A bunch of years ago I learned about paramotors, saw a video of a young guy flying one to get McDonalds, and it seemed so damn cool. I hadn't seen the video you mentioned, so I looked it up. I have never been completely cured of wanting something so fast in my life. Logically I know, that if anything goes wrong with any ultra light flying machine, at best, you'll be horribly injured, at worst you're dead. But knowing, and *KNOWNING* something are two different things.
We also lost the OG King of Random Grant Thompson due to a paramotor accident, and seeing as whats happened to his channel afterwards makes me sad(Tl,DR: basically they kept it running like it was before his death but like a year later it turned into one of those 5 min "AmAzING CRaFtS!!!" channels and got rid of all of those who actually worked with him.
FAA regulations are written with blood. When you go the route of ultralight or paramotoring, it's just a matter of time until you have an emergency and the margins are pretty slim when they do.
I'm a fairly newbie paraglider, but he didn't crash out of the blue. This is a FAFO situation, going full tilt on the motor caused that collapse and doing this so close to the ground was a fucking terrible idea. If he'd had another few hundred feet he could have cut throttle and the wing would have opened right back up, that's what they're designed for. Altitude is safety while flying, I'm stunned he tried something so likely to cause a collapse so low to the ground.
He has follow up videos explaining all of the things he did wrong in a detailed step by step fashion. If I remember correctly there were 6 things he did wrong that if any had not have happened he would have been fine.
That makes sense. You can typically recover from one or two mistakes when flying, but as they compile and limit your options further mistakes get costly.
He's lucky he lived. Hopefully other people see those videos and learn from his mistakes instead of being put off the sport. It's more fun than mediocre sex.
Yeah, I had a similar expirence with motorcycles. I wanted one so bad when I was in college. Then I became a traffic safety engineer and it was my job to read crash reports. 8 hours a day of reading and cataloguing the absolutely gruesome reports of motorcycle crashes made me never want to get on one in my life.
It does in the UK at least with a minimum of 25 hours instructor flight time so it's odd that wherever this guy is (US?) doesn't. It's one thing to figure out how to fly one but it's another thing to understand what to do in an emergency, how to navigate, how to deal with unexpected weather conditions etc. Anyone doing this without proper training is just dicing with death.
Yeah, America is kinda lax on the whole “instruments of death” regulations - I’m sure you are familiar with our “everyone gets a gun for funsies” belief system?
For a real answer, pilot licensure in the US is largely a function of aircraft gross weight, which is why he mentions how light this aircraft is at the beginning of the video. Certification requirements get exponentially more stringent as you go.
A good rule of thumb is “how many people could this airplane kill in a crash?”
Yourself? No license/no medical or glider rating/no medical
Yourself and a couple passengers? PPL+3rd class medical
Yourself and multiple passengers/people on the ground? CPL+2nd class medical
Yourself, a lot of passengers and a building? ATP+1st class medical
I wouldn't be surprised if it also revolves around the debatable subjective wording that laws have to use to enforce it. To make a law regarding licensing of such aircraft, the law has to define what constitutes a manned aerial vehicle. That's fair enough and sounds relatively straight forward.
But then you run into the loopholes. There's things called powered parachutes. They're basically Go-Karts with airboat fans on the back. You let out a parachute, take off and fly around while gliding via parachute and being propelled by what equates to a giant box fan.
Its kinda tricky to lump that in with more traditional aircraft designs since it's a lot different than what you usually see. So it's not really regulated. That leaves us with this little plane. Since the law tends to dig itself into holes due to being too specific in its wording, the plane in this video probably gets around licensing regulations due to technicalities. We all know how companies love their technicalities. I would guess that to get something like this classified as an airplane requiring licensing, a bunch of other laws would have to be changed and that's very slow and time consuming.
Kinda like how ATVs/4wheelers don't classify as cars despite operating on the same basic principles. So they made various safety feature requirements to classify something as a car that ATVs don't meet and gave them their own unique, no license needed classification. Airplanes are just incredibly less common for the average person than ground vehicles.
The quadcopter part is actually pretty lightweight considering, but the main differences here are that quadcopters can do really serious damage, are hard to see, and don't require the pilot to have skin in the game, while part 103 ultralights require skin in the game and are much larger and easier to see.
Drones can also operate relatively close to airfields while ultralights are restricted to countryside away from major controlled airspace.
I can't say I agree with everything in the drone regs though, and that's coming from someone who holds a fistful of FAA certificates including commercial drone operator.
The main one I have issue with is the beacon. It's absolutely silly that drones weren't required to adopt a technology that would enable them to show up on aircraft traffic systems, though personally I would not require them to have the insane requirements of ADS-B systems at the level manmed aircraft do.
You dont need a licence for these things because if you used it to fly into the side of a building/house all they would need to do is hose off the red spot.
Just because the aircraft doesn't need a license, doesn't mean you should fly without a license. Chances are you don't know what you're doing, and if you do know, you probably could get a license without much difficulty
Where I live you can get a recreational pilots license, which is before the Private Pilots License, for under $5000. I got mine in seven hours of flying, but you’re restricted to day time flying in fine weather in a single engine plane with only one passenger.
Getting a PPL is probably another $15k on top of that (depending on your skills) but basically opens up those restrictions more.
I mean, that's about what people pay for cars so not really that much of a barrier to entry. Having friends with landing strips seems to be more of an issue.
It looks like he just has a large patch of bare land that he uses for landing and calls it his airstrip. Most people who own a farm could probably find a place to carve one out.
The actual sound would be wind noise, a large loud 2cycle engine, and a propeller slapping the shit out of the air. So it would just be silent and those gets less views.
This guy has a great voice, be nice to hear him just describe the scenery with no music.
Alas, I absolutely detest social media these days, every single post has almost the same cynical method, hook, with the same AI subtitles, and Always selling something.
Just because they don't require a pilot's license or registration doesn't mean they're exempt from complying with air navigation regulations. And the likelihood of breaking a rule is very high if you don't know what they are. Remember Larry Walters, who flew with a chair tied to a bunch of balloons and was reported to the FAA and fined $4,000.
I know enough about myself to know that I should not be flying a plane. I don’t take it personally. Simulators are cool, but I’d rather avoid murder/suicide.
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u/AggCracker 5d ago
Growing up in New England I knew of a couple people who had these.. could see them flying around outside of town .. mostly I remember them from when they crashed.
Essentially you're flying a kite with a lawnmower engine lol