Day4: Ultralights and a Raptor

Thursday morning we decided to go down to the Ultralight field and display area near the south end of the north-south runway. It turned out that the ultralights had their own little sod strip with small aircraft constantly taking off and landing. Watching them gave me more of an idea which ones really have good performance and which ones were more marginal. We also saw some of the new LSA designs take off from the Ultralight field and that gave us a good look at a couple of them. The sun was once again beating down on us, but despite the heat we wandered up and down the exhibit area where we found both a variety of ultralights and several LSA designs.

Monika was not enthusiastic about the weight-shift control models with the Rogallo wings on top, but one high-winged Experimental-LSA kit imported from France looked promising. It had a center-mounted control stick that allowed me the unimpeded leg room I needed and also made it easier for each of us to climb in and out of the aircraft. Fortunately the kit importer was located in West Virginia about 2 or 3 hours from where we live, so made plans to drive out and take a test flight some time in September.

We hopped back on the tractor-pulled trams ("Nothing Runs Like A Deere!") to return back to the main display area where we had lunch before our first forum of the day, "How To Build an Airplane in Months, Not Years". When homebuilders assemble an airplane from bits and pieces, the process tends to take several years and thousands of hours, and I just wasn't willing to commit to that kind of effort. Under the Experimental-LSA rules, however, a builder can use pre-assembled pieces that dramatically reduce the time of construction. I figured that if I could find LSA kits that required a real time commitment of 150-300 hours or so, I could probably handle that. Unfortunately, things got murky about that time as several vendors were advertising "E-LSA" kits, but the FAA folks said that no real E-LSA kits had yet been formally approved. Hmmm.

During the forums the airshow had started and it was amazing how much noise the "Raptor" makes. The presenter wisely stopped talking while Monika went outside to take pictures. Walking to our next forum, Monika spied Burt Rutan giving autographs, so the old autograph hound stopped to have her EAA hat autographed.

We briefly attended a forum on pilot error, a favorite topic of mine since I had worked in that area of aviation for many years, but I wasn't learning anything new and it was as hot as Hades, so we baled out on that one and instead listened to one on "Jabiru's New Light Sport Aircraft". It's always interesting to hear a vendor pitch his product and run down the competition, but I thought it best to withhold judgment until I had the chance to listen to the competition's side of the story. Many of the forums concerned the pros and cons of specific aircraft, but since we were running out of time I decided we would have to come back to Oshkosh next year to attend some of those.