Ultralights

[ForrestS]

Hey, does any1 fly ultralights cause i need some help. Theres a club(DFW Lite Flyers) in my area but there website dosent say much. I figured one of u staff members might know what im talking about scence u live in my general area. Cause i would love 2 fly Ultralights but i dont know any1 who flys them. I would really like 2 get the "Challenger 2 and put some floats on it and take it down 2 Lake Ray Roberts and fly it around. tyvm:)  

[indy007]

I'm thinking you need to hit the search button.

You're looking for Chairboy's experience in ultralights, and Golfer's commentary on it.


In the end, Chair bought a certified aircraft.

[ForrestS]

ty

[Chairboy]

For the record, Golfer's commentary had nothing to do with my decision.  In fact, it was terribly unhelpful.  I felt he took credit for a decision I made quite separately from his "advice", and his condescension did favors to nobody.  Golfer's advice on some subjects and reality do not share the same vectors.

I decided against ultralights in general because I didn't like the way the one I flew felt (light weight = tossed around at the whim of the wind), nor the typical high revs of the engines most of them have.  Also, it's a bit misleading to suggest that I went for a certified aircraft because of the experience, I was mid-purchase of a Long-EZ before finding out that the stock design didn't allow for my long legs, and that was well after my flight of infamy.

For the original poster, go up in a 2-seater ultralight with a trainer first to see if it's what you want.  The noise and bumpiness doesn't translate well to the videos you see online, but if it turns out to be what you want, there are some nice looking light sport planes (previously 'fat ultralights') like the Rans Coyote II and the S-12XL (the second which is similar to the Challenger).

C'mon, guys, get it right.

[cpxxx]

If I lived in the countryside with a nice field nearby I would get an ultralight to buzz around on summer evenings or winter mornings. It would be great fun.
I only flew an ultralight once. It was a thing called a 'Snowbird' and what a scary experience that was. It was yellow like a cub, it used spoilers instead of ailerons which had zero feel. You zipped yourself in and sat on a couple of seats that resembled lawn chairs with a weirdly shaped central joystick. The ASI was nothing if not innovative. It consisted of a circle of light bulbs, green lit up for safe airspeed, red for too slow or too fast. It had a Rotax engine with a chainsaw sound and the smell of two stroke oil was everywhere.

It was really too windy to be flying an ultralight that day but the Instructor was a legend with multiple thousands of hours who once flew for Imperial Airways and was Chief pilot of Aer Lingus twice and was a living breathing 'tally ho chaps, jolly good show type' who so saw no problem flying the little Snowbird in a minor gale.

So off we lurched like a drunken wasp. The turbulence was impressive and the light show from the ASI, equally so. Red, green red, red green red, stall warning to VNE in the time it takes to say it. I stirred the stick which didn't seemed to be attached to anything but the spoilers flapped away like crazy.
The instructor was not impressed with my handling and kept grabbing the controls off me but he had little control either.  Eventually we put it down on the grass runway and waddled into the ramp, unzipped ourselves and tried to clear our lungs of two stroke fumes.

I was not impressed but then it was hardly a day for flying anything lighter than a 747. But it was an experience.

[LePaul]

Ive seen the local ultralights out here and my comments would mirror what Chairboy has said.  High revs, tossed about the winds very easily....just not my cup of tea.

Sure, some look impressive.  But for ME...I'd prefer a full-blown aircraft.

Chair, I was disapopinted to see you couldnt fit into a VariEze.  A much as I like those designs, the fact you are at the mercy of the builder is always worrisome to me.  Ive read too many accident reports where the original builder made a boo-boo, or a poor mod that eventually caused a catastrophic failure.  One that comes to mind was a gent who didnt probably attach the wing roots to the fuselage.  It stayed together for a few hours, then just failed completely on a flight  

[Golfer]

Originally posted by indy007
I'm thinking you need to hit the search button.

You're looking for Chairboy's experience in ultralights, and Golfer's commentary on it.


In the end, Chair bought a certified aircraft.

I'm going to chime in on that as well.  My points wern't meant to be ultralights = bad.  They're not.  I've flown a couple (the Challenger II and II short wing variants included) and they can be a lot of fun.

My points mostly had to do with using auto engines in airplanes and relative safety of experimental airplanes compared to certified airplanes.

I'm absolutely sure that Chairboy didn't make any decisions based on my commentary but my concerns were at some of the reasoning and decisions made in the process.  Not a personal vendetta against Chairboy but addressing numerous red flags that went flying in interest of smoking hole prevention.  Mostly involved in getting in too deep too quickly.  Chairboy learned about this the day he flew a tailwheel airplane the first time...solo.  He learned a lot from that and along the road he picked up enough information to stay that much safer as he gains that much more experience.

I don't recall ever "taking credit" for Chairboy doing anything but I did throw in a few juvenile "I told you so" jabs.  I would have sang a different tune had his tailwheel flight gone the other way...which it very easily could have.

I disagree with a few things with experimental engines/certain airplanes but thats my personal choice to not fly them.  Rotary engines, auto engine conversions and airplanes are glorified kites fall into those categories.  Again...my decisions but its the experiemental builders and tinkerers that figure out how to make them work safely over time so good on them for being the test pilots.

My only other tip would be is not use 1 as "one" and 2 as "to/too" when typing.  Just some good advice 4U...

Yep it's as gay as I thought it would be


Did you decide on an EGT and the rest of your panel Chairboy?

[Chairboy]

The juvenile "I told you so's" were poisonous and had no place in a failure analysis discussion.  That's the kind of thing that teaches pilots that it's better to stay quiet about screwups than to be honest and possibly get ridiculed for it.  

Your attitude and the way you responded to my "I screwed up, and this is how" full disclosure might kill someone some day if you use it in real life.  Some pilot might hear your response and neglect to share their hard-knocks education to someone else because of what they saw in your behavior taught them that it's better to stay quiet.

NASA forms exist because SOMEONE figured that sharing hard lessons might be more important than grinding the offenders face into the dirt with a boot.  YOU might do some other pilot a favor some day by realizing that.

[Golfer]

Did I not admit they were juvenile?  It's hard to bite my tongue on this but you shouldn't have made that mistake in the first place.  You did live so you've got that going for you.

On to more important business...did you make any decisions on your panel?

[Chairboy]

Not just juvenile, poisonous.  That's an attitude that kills pilots, ones that listen to you and the ones they might have shared a screwup with but didn't.  

Regarding my panel, nope.  Decided against the Bendix stuff I was looking at because it would probably need a long cable run (the G/S receiver would likely need to go in the tail) and difficult hardware support.  

I'm just flying right now, almost every day.  It's fantastic.  Today, I dropped down to the airport on my motorcycle, then practiced turns around a point and steep turns, plus I threw the plane around into some unusual attitudes, that was fun.  Flew up a river for a while, feeling the effects the hills below had on the airflow and turbulence at different elevations and shapes.  Found a friend's house that has an airstrip and circled once to see if he would come out, then went and tried a Chandelle based off of a description I read.  It was pretty shaky, good thing I don't have a commercial checkride in my near future.

Did one fun thing, took a marine air-horn up and asked my wife to come outside and listen for it when I flew over her office (I blew it out the little 'smokers window' on the Cherokee).  She listened, but didn't hear anything.  Bummer.  

I've had the plane for just over 3 weeks and have 29.1 hours in it so far.  Life is good.

[Chairboy]

Also, I'm weighing CHT/EGT against a G/S install.  I've been reading up on Lean Of Peak operations, and it's intriguing.  My carburated setup might not allow it, but the discussion has me curious about what's happening under the cowling.

[VWE]

Do you 2 need a time out? And all of y'all are pronoucing the word wrong, its pronouced 'ultrafrights'...

[lazs2]

I flew em for a while.   It is some of the most fun I have ever had...  to go down into little valleys and skip over the ground a few feet off the grass and bounce up over fences and tree lines...  No feds crawling up your butt.

You can't get the ultralight experiance in a commercial craft.. I find normal planes  pretty boring.  cooking under 30 year old or older plexiglass...  going over the same old "patch" every other weekend or so.

The disadvantages to ultralights are... You simply can't fly em if the wind is more than about 15 mph... you can but.. it is not that great an idea.  

The engines.. the frigging two strokes are unreliable in the extreme..  I might still be flying em if they had light 4 strokes that worked.  

They are a fair weather plane but so what?  You can't get out in the wind in anything else these days.   The crap engines and the fact that the wind will make them unflyable makes em very dangerous tho.  

Like cpxx....When I get some land I will look into them again.   look into the engines and such.    or..  get a piper cub type thing and hope no one catches me taking it out once in a while...  

lazs

[Golfer]

Originally posted by Chairboy
Also, I'm weighing CHT/EGT against a G/S install.  I've been reading up on Lean Of Peak operations, and it's intriguing.  My carburated setup might not allow it, but the discussion has me curious about what's happening under the cowling.

Look up 55Tdoc on the subject.  He's probably the single most proficient person I've ever talked to about lean-of-peak operations.  The benefits in the Cherokee are minimal and the technique unforgiving if you goof it up.

You might want to look into having a CFI take you up and demo all the commercial maneuvers (which would cover the chandelles) because I've had more than one student stall the airplane performing them.

[Halo]

I'm not a pilot but I've always loved the idea of ultralights.  

However, a friend, who was a United Air Lines senior pilot and flew his own taildragger, considered them risky and not a good value.  He said you could just about get a decent old previously flown regular plane and a pilot's license for not that much more expense and a lot more safety.

Took a glider ride and liked that much more -- love adapting to the elements for propulsion and oneness with the environment like sailing and surfing.  But inconvenient having to stalk the power sources instead of just switching on the ignition.  

I console myself with Aces High and MS Flight Simulator, especially the old Waco biplane.