LSA Requirements

[rosiejerryrosie]

Airports with restaurants? Wazzat?

Down here we have vending machines.

Mark your calendar for Father's Day weekend 15-17 June and plan to fly up to Shreveport North (62PA) for the 23rd Father's Day Fly In. All you can eat prime rib with all the fixen's on Friday, and an all you can eat traditional picnic on Saturday (Bar-B-Q, chicken, pulled pork, salads, drinks and desert. Free aviation related movies with free popcorn on the flight line each night after dark. And since it is also the 25th anniversary of the founding of the sponsors (the Mason-Dixon Sport Flyers), appropriate celebrations of that historic event are being planned. (No - a flight from Alabama would not be too long, and it would be an adventure you could write up as a chapter in your upcoming book

[Frank Giger]

If that's not incentive to have the Nieuport done with the 40 worked off nothing is!

[rosiejerryrosie]

If that's not incentive to have the Nieuport done with the 40 worked off nothing is!

Great! I'll reserve a spot for you.

[tdm]

No, it will never happen. Be glad they got the gross weight up to 1320 as it is.

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news..._206054-1.html

Durr

[steveinindy]

If they are doing it in the name of safety, I'd be surprised if they bump it up more than a couple hundred pounds. To be honest though, if one really chose to do something in the interest of safety, it would not be necessary to increase the weight requirement. One could build an aircraft that would hold up much better than any of the spam cans that might be at the low end of the weight spectrum and likely candidates for inclusion under any reasonable expansion of the LSA or drivers license medical proposals. The technology exists and the techniques are well within the grasp of the average homebuilder. The problem is simply a matter of focus.

What I mean by that is the urge to cut weight out of an aircraft tends to result in some real haphazard practices (flimsy fuel tanks, unshielded fuel lines, seats with zero stroking capability, poorly secured restraints, no headrests on the seats, etc) . The urge to give great visibility tends to also hamper safety in the sent that often the first thing to be scaled back or done away with all together is the aircraft equivalent of a car's A pillar. In an aircraft (which ever seldom encounters a crash scenario short of a runway overrun or excursion that does not involve a significant vertical component), this is one of the main structures that helps to keep the engine and its mounting from folding up and back compressing the instrument panel down onto the pilot and front seat passenger's legs and lap. It also provides a great deal of the structural integrity of the roof which can mean the difference between walking away from a crash and having a closed casket funeral as the result of sub-total or total decapitation. It's not that the folks who design and build LSAs aren't thinking about safety (quite the contrary....some of the best constructed restraint systems I have ever seen in small aircraft have been in a couple of LSAs) it's just that other concerns tend to grab people's attention and the resulting design may have some serious drawbacks that are unintentionally counter to the issue of safety.

The other side of the coin is that those of us with safety as an major interest and focus, seem to look more towards the average GA aircraft instead of LSAs and ultralights. I hate to put it this way (especially point #2), but the main reason my focus is there is two-fold: 1. those are the kinds of planes that interest me because the LSA speed and operating restrictions tend to be almost absolutely counter to the very reasons I get into an airplane let alone design and build one. 2. Honestly, that's where the money is since the commercial end of LSAs hasn't developed sufficiently to attract much focus. Now, that's not to say I would not be thrilled to go to work with/for the EAA or the LAMA or anyone else for that matter on the issue of improving LSA or homebuilt crash survivability....just that I don't see it happening at least not until the economy continues to recover like it is currently for another couple of years.

All of that said, I am sitting on a more or less complete LSA design with most of the safety features that current technology will allow while still allowing two real average size adult men (read as 6'2" 200 lb guys) to sit in it comfortably. It was something I worked on in my spare time but shelved due to a lack of interest in actually building it myself deciding rather to focus on an aircraft that actually meets my desires.

[S3flyer]

My guess is that the EAA/FAA will not mess with the ASTM 1320lbs by generically increasing it to some higher number but will consider an allowance of XX pounds for safety equipment such as a chute or airbags. If you don't have the safety equipment, you don't get the higher weight. I'd guess we're talking 30-50lbs extra. I believe one of the UK aircraft classes has a 20kg allowance for such things.

[kscessnadriver]

http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news..._206054-1.html

Durr

Wow, that's an intelligent post. I'll put this one in the same group as the no medical for private pilots. Something the FAA is researching but will never happen.

[Frank Giger]

Using safety as a reason to increase weight is a full circle argument for why the LSA rules came about in the first place, and assumes that the intial purpose was to get pilots flying certified aircraft into lighter ones.

That's backwards.

Problem:

Ultralights were a real problem.

Loads of them were overweight ("fat"), but because they're unregulated there was no policing of them. An FAA guy had to have a good reason to compel the pilot (who could be unlicensed) to undergo a weight and balance. Too often the good reason was after a wreck.

With the advances of composites and other materials, the weight put on ultralights became an issue versus capabilities. Ultralights could be far more than wieght shifted kites with engines putting along at ten miles an hour - smart builders were making them fly very fast and very far....and who knows how much gas the tank holds from the outside?

And the pilots of said ultralights are completely unregulated. Forget a medical - these guys and gals don't require any training at all to jump in, fire it up, and go around the pattern. That's a statement from the FAA viewpoint, of course; the ultralight pilots I know take it very seriously and do get training, if it can be informal.

To make things less onerous and to encourage compliance, the FAA struck out the medical requirement (which is one of the reasons cited by ultralight pilots for being there in the first place) for the new category. Smart guys with PPL's realized they could fly under those rules, and use the SPL stats to fight the Class III medical requirement itself.

The FAA can't illegalize ultralights and can't enforce the rules on ultralights (there aren't enough of them to go out and check), so they did the best compromise they could using Canada and Europe as guidelines and tweaking them. They invented the LSA.

Cruise less than 120 kts, stall no greater than 45, two seats maximum, gross weight of 1325 (which is the result of upping it twice in committee - and resulting in non-compliance with ICAO), daytime VFR only with pilots requiring no medical (other than driver's license and self certification) and a revised set of standards for their permit (20 hours minimum, reduced cross country, and some limitations placed on them once they got their ticket).

The fat ultralight became legal, and the pilot was trained. Everyone was happy, as the problem was solved!



Okay, maybe not everyone. The FAA said from the start that the LSA category of aircraft was somewhat arbitrary, with no existing aircraft taken into consideration. I actually believe that - they were thinking in terms of making ultralights fatter, not making production planes lighter, or giving a loophole to aging PPL holders to the biannual medical exam.

When pressed, they came out with the dubious saw that the new category will encourage an innovative wave of production aircraft that will be affordable, spurring economic expansion and the growth of aviation in general.

At the end of the day, though, it was all about getting aircraft that previously had no official airworthiness standards (other than being able to fly) inspected by a government representative, and the pilot likewise certified.

All in the name of safety.

[steveinindy]

resulting in non-compliance with ICAO

Since when has that ever stopped the FAA?

NOTE: This post was made with a BAC somewhere around what keeps Patty Wagstaff from suffering delirium tremens. I make no claims to the veracity nor grammatical or syntactic correctness of this post.

[Frank Giger]

I don't blame them for blowing off the ICAO requirements, to be honest.

The USA is bordered by very few countries (only Canada and Mexico contiguously), and most pilots rarely leave our nation's borders.

It would be a big deal if we were like the European countries where an hour's flight could cross multiple borders.

And raise a glass for me - I'm at a place where I can't drink.