FAQ – Training_

Training is critical if you expect to safely fly an ultralight.  Unfortunately, the new (as of 2010) FAA rules have done away with legal ultralight (UL) training aircraft.

The minimum hours that most competent UL training required was 10 hours.  Sport Pilot (SP) training takes a minimum of 20 hours, so to get a full SP license would be roughly twice what you were going to spend on UL training.  And, renting an LSA during training will probably cost more than what a UL instructor would charge for using his UL trainer, so, maybe the cost is 2.5 times more. But even if the financial requirements were the same, there’s another problem.

The FAA rule, by essentially eliminating 2-seat UL trainers, has also eliminated most of the trainers that would provide you with training in an aircraft with the same flight envelope and characteristics that you’ll find with most ultralights.  In other words, you can get trained in an LSA, but the chances are that LSA won’t fly anything like a Quicksilver, Challenger or Phantom.  And this is the biggest hole in the new FAA rules.

So, what can you do?

Good or bad, here are the most realistic choices:

1) Get your student Sport Pilot (SP) certificate; it’s free at your local FSDO (a FSDO stands for: Flight Standards District Office, which is a locally affiliated field office of the US FAA.)
2) Find a local SP instructor (see links below, and try Google for all the local flight schools)
3) Inform the instructor your primary interest is in flying ultralights and ask if they have a UL-style trainer.  (They will try to talk you into a Sport Pilot training program… and that’s okay if that’s what you want, but if you only want UL-style training, then insist on it.)
4) If they don’t want to train you, or if they don’t have a UL-style LSA, then you can continue to ask around at other schools, troll the Internet UL email lists/forums/Facebook for possibilities, or, most likely, just accept the training as they offer it.
5) If you get trained in a slippery LSA then keep in mind that, upon completing that training, you will need to find someone who owns a 2-seat experimental LSA (i.e., an ex-2-seat UL trainer) with flight characteristics similar to the UL you’re interested in, and try to get them to let you go fly with them.  Maybe they’ll even let you take over the controls a bit.  (I say “need”… no, you don’t need to do this step, but it’s highly recommended.  A lot of pilots trained in more slippery aircraft will jump into an ultralight and, on their first landing, will stall too high and crash the UL.  Many ULs are very draggy.)

You don’t even have to finish the SP course… just take the ground school, then take enough hours until you solo.  At that point, you will have had at least as much training as you would in the UL schools of the good-ol’-days.  Extra training is never a bad thing, and you’ll be more than half-way to a Sport Pilot certificate…  and I would encourage you to finish.  After all, while it’s legal to fly a UL without training, it’s a bad idea.  Plus, you’ll learn about airspaces,  what you can and cannot do, and a lot of other good information.  It’s worth it!  It’s also a really good idea to become very familiar with FAR 103 — the ultralight air vehicle rules.  (They may not cover them in SP training.)

This process isn’t the quickest, but it’s probably the safest approach for learning to fly a UL in today’s regulatory environment.

Two good sources for instructors are the EAA and USUA websites:

EAA Find An UL Instructor

http://www.usua.org/SportPilot/FAA.html

… or simply do a Google search on “LSA training near me” or “LSA instructors near me”.