While the head of the FAA — Marion Blakey — was at Oshkosh this year, the EAA had a private interview with her where she made comments about ultralights. With permission from EAA AirVenture Today, here are parts of the reporting on that interview:
“The FAA has no intention of doing away with Part 103,� FAA Administrator Marion Blakey said Friday about her agency’s rule authorizing and regulating ultralight aircraft.
Blakey said the entry of Cessna and Cirrus aircraft into the LSA market demonstrates that light sport has become “mainstream and real� and that it will be “a firmly rooted part of aviation’s future.� Companies like Cessna and Cirrus wouldn’t get into LSA, she added, if they didn’t think it was an important market.
The growing LSA market offers new opportunities for young people to fly and, “it’s a catalyst for ingenuity and new designs,� Blakey added. It represents “an avenue into aviation that just wasn’t there� before the sport pilot/light-sport aircraft rule was finalized at EAA AirVenture in 2004.
“It seems to me,� Blakey said, “that there is a natural migration� occurring from ultralights to light-sport aircraft because of the opportunity that LSAs represent, “but that doesn’t mean there won’t also be a tremendous draw into ultralights. The aircraft are different and I think the incentives to fly them are different�
Ultralights, she said, represent “a true individuality and freedom, and that’s going to continue.�
Well, she might as well have said, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you!� In would have sounded just as genuine.
First of all, most of her comments were really about SP/LSA, not ultralights. And her suggestion that there is a “natural migration� from ultralights to LSA is balderdash! When the feds take away your exemption, and tell you your expensive 2-seat UL trainer will be a lawn ornament unless you convert, then there’s nothing “natural� about it… it’s a forced measure, nothing less.
And her statement about ultralights representing true individuality and freedom is just a feel-good sound bite, with no heart behind it. If she were genuinely interested and concerned about ultralights, then why did she take away our ability to train new UL pilots in aircraft that have similar flight characteristics of the UL craft they want to learn how to fly?
For example, if you want to fly a Quicksilver — a tube and wire, low and slow ultralight — then you really need to be trained in a 2-seat Quicksilver. And one would argue that there’s nothing stopping the Quicksilver company from creating an S-LSA 2-seat Quicksilver that can be used for training. Well, in theory, no, but in real life, the cost of such a trainer would be 3 to 4 times the cost of the one’s that have been flying to 10+ years. No one could ever recoup their costs, so no one would actually buy one. If no one buys them, then what are the new UL pilots going to be trained in? A Cessna 162, that flies more like a LearJet than a Quicksilver?
The control freaks in Congress who want every thing flying around in the skies to be identifiable obviously don’t care anything about “true freedom.� And the complete safety they crave will always be beyond their grasp, never to be attained, yet all the while eroding our freedoms. This isn’t just about ultralights, folks, this is about a wave of change in the way people think in this country, and, frankly, it sucks. As more and more control is given to the government by the people, then people relinquish control of their lives to the government. This is not a trend you want to see continued. Fight back now by telling your elected (and soon to be elected) officials that, thank you very much for the billions of dollars spent in the name of safety and [cough, cough] “homeland� security, but I’ll pass and take my freedom back, please.