Article UPDATED 1/29/24 — See at bottom —DJ
You may have experienced this but I just got sticker shock. A young pilot told me he is facing a $1,000 fee for his Private Pilot check ride. What?! I got my license so long ago I forgot how much I paid but, obviously… “A dollar doesn’t buy what it used to!”
A few sources confirmed $1,000 is a common fee. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying a check ride isn’t worth that much; it’s merely a bigger number than expected, although my young pilot friend still has to come up with that amount of dough. Whew!
When friends and family complain about grocery store prices or the cost of air travel, I shrug and say, “Tell me something that has not gone up by 50 or 100% in the last three years.” No one loves the situation but those are economic facts.
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LSA Pilot Review of a Multicopter: Lift Aircraft’s Part 103-Eligible Hexa
Ready or not, new flying machines are headed our way. Correction, they are already here and a wave of similar entries could follow (see earlier reports). The earliest market-ready arrivals qualify under FAR Part 103.
I believe this website needs to report these aircraft, so with pleasure, I announce the following to be perhaps the first multicopter pilot report from “one of us.” Scott Severen is a longtime LSA pilot, the importer of Jabiru aircraft, and the newly-elected President of LAMA, the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association. Scott offers his impressions as one of the very first non-company pilots to fly one of these aircraft.
Some call them multicopters (me). Some prefer eVTOL. C’mon, have you said a mouthful like “eVTOL” to any non-pilot? …or even to most pilots? They look at you blankly, “Huh?” Marketers of these aircraft have yet to settle on a catchy word to identify them.
AVI’s Affordable, Foldable, Composite Part 103 Ultralight Aircraft Gets a Fresh New Look
Aeromarine LSA’s Chip Erwin is one but certainly not the only busy fellow in the modern Part 103 aircraft space. AVI’s Radu Berceanu is another a man on the move. Chip works in metal. Radu works in composite. You know Chip better (he’s adept at PR) but you probably know Radu’s designs. Readers have responded enthusiastically to articles and videos about Swan.
In an earlier article I promised a video look. Now that the flying season is easing into the holidays, I have more time to spend editing videos. What takes a few minutes to shoot takes hours to edit but I’m pleased to let you hear from Radu himself. His English is quite good and you get a lot of views of the new & improved Swan, now called Swan LE.
Fresh Swan Retake
The article from April this year had additional detail for Swan LE and mentions Dracula, the subject of a future video and article.
News Wrap — Lift Offers Part 103 Hexa for Work; Aero Asia Success Points to 30th Anniversary Event
As I recently wrote about Aerial Work for Mosaic LSA, perhaps it’s fitting to write about Part 103 vehicles doing commercial work.
But isn’t flying for hire prohibited in Part 103? Yes, it is.
However, “public use” aircraft do not have to meet FAA aircraft certification regulations nor operating limitations. “Public use” can include activities like police, fire, rescue, border patrol, and similar typically government functions whether provided by federal, state, or local agencies. In short, government departments at all levels get special privileges.
This means little to pilots unless you are one flying for a government agency. For the producers, however, this can mean potentially lucrative sales. In the case of Part 103 multicopter producers it may represent a means of market entry.
In this article I reference an aircraft covered before called Hexa (earlier article, with more aircraft detail), designed and built by Lift Aircraft in Austin, Texas.
TrueLite’s New Wing — U.S. Importer On-Site Finalizing Affordable Part 103 Project
When I wrote about TrueLite a little over one year ago, readers loved the concept pushing the article to one of my best-read pieces of the year. That story had lots of detail, different from what follows.
Now the story is the start of production and preparation of import to the US for final assembly.
Francesco Di Martino is the man behind Zigolo, a superlight Part 103 entry. Zigolo looked so light in construction, relying partly on cable support, some pilots were hesitant about the design. A few years passed and sales were made but behind the hangar door, Francesco was busy with his Aviad company.
As a follow-on to the earlier project, Francesco created the all-metal, much-updated Mg21 as he called it; Zigolo was called Mg12.
When Francesco linked up with Part 103 impresario Chip Erwin of Merlin Lite fame, things started to move quickly.
A Song to Lift Your Spirits — Clever, Sleek, and Part 103-Capable from Future Vehicles
You know this airplane and you know this company, although a refresher might be in order.
You can be excused if this one slips you mind. The airplane in the nearby images was from years ago when you probably first saw it with an electric motor developed by Randall Fishman, one of the original pioneers in the electric aircraft space.
He was so far ahead of his time that a market for electric had yet to develop. When Randall flew his first battery-electric-powered trike 16 years ago at Oshkosh 2007, no one was using the terms “air taxi” or “multicopter.”
Electric Aircraft Corporation didn’t complete many sales but Randall’s developments were ground-breaking.
Now the handsome Song returns with a new producer, Future Vehicles. Earlier I wrote about the charming biplane Dingo, a modern-day follow-on to Hovey’s Whing Ding and worthy entry in the Part 103 space.
Ahead of Its Time, Rainbow’s EMG — Electric Motor Glider — Proved Idea of Electric Part 103
Nine years ago, in 2014, electric aircraft were mostly experiments and the beginning was challenging. Several ill-fated projects attempted to electrically power airplanes that were inappropriate for such a powerplant. Batteries of the day had lousy power-to-weight ratios. Enough juice to lift and fly a two seater, much less a four seater, by an electric motor made for very short duration flights, measured in minutes not hours. An electric Cessna 172 project never succeeded; hardly a wonder.
Similar challenges face more than 350 air taxi start-up businesses. Sure, someday you might zip around big cities using UberAir but I think that remains years in the future. Range anxiety felt in electric cars becomes much more intense in an aircraft.
On the other hand, electric Part 103 aircraft enjoy two enormous advantages: (1) they only need to fly 30 minutes to an hour to deliver all the fun their owners have in mind; and (2) since Part 103 aircraft are the lightest in powered aviation, lifting them by electric power and batteries is far more achievable with today’s technology.
Super-Affordable Part 103 Dingo (low $20,000s, complete) Enters Production
While you continue digesting FAA’s 318-page thriller on Mosaic, here’s a fun aircraft that does not have to spend even one minute meeting those new rules. I’ve written about the Part 103-compliant Dingo from Future Flight before (this article) but the delightful biplane is now entering production.
Tom Peghiny of Flight Design USA fame, wrote, “Jan Jilek is one of the design engineers of Future Vehicles as well as their test pilot. He is also a talented aerobatic performer. We flew together in a few planes while I was working in Sumperk, CZ [as a consultant to Flight Design].”
Dingo was created by Marek Ivanov. At the beginning of 2021, he showed the first 3D images to the Future Vehicles team. This is an experienced group that does a wide range of engineering work for a variety of aircraft producers.
Describing Dingo
Dingo’s airframe is primarily riveted 6061 and 2024 aluminum sheet.
Air Taxi or Air Funster? — 5 Models in Development, as Part 103 Multicopters Not Taxis
If you listen to perpetually-excited media, air taxis will soon be shuttling people hither and yon in all the big cities of the globe. Executives and shoppers will be whisked around downtown skyscrapers silently, quietly, swiftly, and the cost will be modest. Do you buy all that? I’m not holding my breath.
Oh, these air taxi vehicles are coming. I don’t doubt that, if for no other reason than they are absorbing vast amounts of money as people bet on some grand future where infotech merges with aviation to make flying vastly better and easier. It’s a fantastic dream and when smart people powered by enough money work on something long enough… something often happens.
Fine. That’s the sales pitch and apparently it’s working because more than 350 companies around the globe have raised billions of dollars to pursue their dreams yet the first entries remain far from market.
Several people at the very pinnacle of FAA have departed the agency and are now working for air taxi developers (naturally, they are often called by some term other than the mundane “air taxi” label).
Magical Merlin Motorglider Goes Both Ways: Part 103 or Motorglider; Gas or Electric
Regular readers know I have closely followed the Merlin developments. I use plural because developer Chip Erwin has steadily built this single seat flying machine into a whole fleet of its own. At Sun ‘n Fun we saw a display of three airplanes in different variations.
Let’s begin with a focus on the modest cost of Merlin. I promote affordable aviation all day long. That word “affordable” means something different to every single pilot so every time I use the word someone is going to tell me, “It’s still too expensive.”
Look I get it. I’m a consumer, too. Plus, who doesn’t enjoy a deal? So here’s the short answer: “Finished Price: $34,000.” That’s a direct quote from Aeromarine-LSA. I know some may say that doesn’t work for them but in this day and age, that is a bargain for a ready-to-fly aircraft. When that buys an airplane built like Merlin Lite, one equipped the way Chip has configured it, I consider that one of the great values in aviation.
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