Search Results for : multicopter

Pilots around the world are aware of Part 103 Ultralights but many have a blurry view of the industry that produces these aircraft. Most are unaware how well this often-overlooked segment is doing in recent years, even during Covid 2020.
FAA refers to these lightweight flying machines as “ultralight vehicles,” a term that creative rulewriters adopted in the early 1980s to avoid heavy regulations typical for “aircraft.” This wording helped the young industry grow and develop. It worked so well the regulation has not been altered for decades.
Even ultralight enthusiasts in America and other countries may not be fully aware how popular ultralights have become in recent years. When Light-Sport Aircraft came on the scene in 2004 they knocked out the ultralight two-seater training fleet. Many believe ultralights never recovered.
How wrong they were, yet who can blame them because no one truly knows how many ultralights are being built and sold these days.

So far, at least three entries* in the multicopter sweepstakes qualify themselves as Part 103 ultralight vehicles. I’m guessing that lead FAA rule writer, Mike Sacrey, never envisioned this idea back in 1982 when he and his team created aviation’s least-regulated aviation sector. In those days, FAA had only recently moved away from requiring that such aircraft demonstrate foot launching.
Mike would have needed a genuine crystal ball to foresee something like Scorpion 36 years ago. Let’s briefly put this in perspective — most readers had yet to buy their first computer; we were still 13 years away from the World Wide Web; it was a quarter century before the iPhone; even Light-Sport Aircraft were 22 years in the future.
Had Mike written a regulation back then to include multicopters like Scorpion he would surely have been relocated to some remote post where his craziness would not be obvious.

This article again delves into the changing face of aviation and in this case within the Part 103 Ultralight Vehicle sector.
Infotech in Part 103 ultralight vehicles means far more than GPS or even synthetic vision digital screens (imagine an iPad mated to a Levil box … remarkable stuff and for very little money). However, digital avionics are not the point of this story.
In the last few days, a formerly Canadian company, Opener, announced their new eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing), the second developer I know of to adopt Part 103’s simplicity and freedom. Like Kitty Hawk’s Flyer*, the rather unusually-named BlackFly also calls itself an “ultralight,” more precisely meaning an ultralight vehicle that can operate under Part 103. What you might like about this, compared to more than a dozen “air taxi” designs, is that BlackFly appears aimed at recreational flyers (as does Flyer).

While I doubt airliner behemoths Boeing or Airbus are aiming to create aircraft you might buy, their work along with other developers, may nonetheless lead to something new in the future for recreational aircraft pilots and buyers.
According to a report in Wired magazine, “On the morning of January 31, eight buzzing rotors lifted a black bubble of an aircraft off the ground for the first time … Vahana Alpha One spent 53 seconds aloft, under its own power and autonomous control. It reached a height of 16 feet. The flight may not sound like much, but the team from Airbus … and aerospace experts say such flights of experimental aircraft mark the start of a fundamental change in the way we get around.”
Writer Jack Stewart goes on to state, “Alpha One … is a full-scale demonstrator of a single-person, vertical take-off and landing aircraft. The idea … is to remake the way we fly.