Learning to transition into ultralights

[Bob Furr]

Your experience resembles mine. I had a total of about 90 hours in a variety of aircraft including C150/152. I also had about 4 hours in a Aeronca Champ. Flying my Starflight (like the Aerolite) was a lot like flying an entire flight in the Cessna with the flaps at full deflection. The time in the Champ made the stick control seem natural. For me the hardest part was the landings as I had to learn to keep quite a bit of power on and it felt like landing a go kart.... you get much closer to the ground before the flare or you will drop it in hard from stalling about 5 feet too high. When you lift the nose without power an ultralight will immediately bleed off speed. I have been flying mine for over 2 years now and finally feel fully competent landing without power but it is amazing how steep the decent can be... almost shuttle like but at 40 mph.

[1600vw]

I fly my down wind leg at about 700-800'. Look over left and the runway will be almost below you. You are off to the side slightly. Then once the thrush hold of the runway is over my left shoulder I turn for Base, making this turn, I lower the nose as I make this turn also lower the throttle to idle. As you state you are pointing the nose down at a good angle keeping the speed at your landing speed. Need to loose speed raise the nose some, not much though for speed drops fast.

With these little airplane if you have trees or homes at the end of the runway and you have at least 2000' runway do not cross the end of the runway. Now this is in these small light aircraft that are either ultralights or really close like what I fly.

These things will not glide and you do not want to be 200' above a tree line and find yourself with an engine out. Instead as you climb out start moving off to one side of the runway and do not fly a center line down the middle. Stay within glide distance from the side, so you are holding it tight in so to speak. Then as you get ready to come to the end of the runway, lower the nose and bank back across to the other side of the runway.

Now you are on the down wind leg moving farther out to the side as you climb. As you come to the other end of the runway you come back across again and now you are flying on the otherside or where you started from after takeoff but moving out farther as you climb. Once you reach 700- or 800' you can exit the pattern and have some fun.

This is how I do it. I have a line of tree's at one end of the runway running the center line of the runway. In other words once you take off you are over tree's, then corn and beans on each side. This is the west end. The east end has homes and tree's. I avoid these area's even when landing. I do not fly over homes nor will I fly down the center line of those tree's.

Doing my takeoff's like this has saved my butt once. Today I would not have an airplane and just maybe may not be typing this if I did not fly my takeoff's like this. I had a part break on takeoff and because I just turned back across the runway and was off to the side I just slipped her back onto the runway and landed. If I would not have done this I was either in the tree's or the corn and beans. All bad choices.

Tony