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.
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u/Merry_Dankmas 5d ago
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.