Aerial Maneuvers: Piloting an Ultralight Aircraft

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Outside Magazine, May 2004

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Aerial Maneuvers (cont.)

EVEN BEFORE THERE were written words, humans dreamed of flying, envying the freedom of flitting songbirds and marveling at the raptors soaring overhead. The desire to fly is so ubiquitous in ancient myth and folklore that it seems hardwired into our consciousness.

Four thousand years ago, the Chinese emperor Shun was said to have taken off by flapping two large reed hats. Egypt's sun god, Ra, is often depicted wearing falcon wings. Greek mythology recounts the fatal flight of Icarus, whose wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. The Tang dynasty poet Li Po claimed to have been borne aloft in a chariot pulled by a phoenix and a dragon. Milarepa, an 11th-century Tibetan Buddhist monk, was said to have attained the gift of flight and ridden a small drum to the top of the holy mountain Kailas.

It was only a matter of time before actual mortals attempted takeoff. In the early 11th century, a monk named Eilmer leaped from a tower in Malmesbury, England, with winglike contraptions strapped to his arms and managed to glide several hundred yards before tumbling from the sky and breaking both legs.

Four centuries later, over a period of 40 years, Leonardo da Vinci produced more than 400 sketches and references, in his obsessive attempts to figure out the mechanics of flying. In the late 18th century, a British scientist named George Cayley formulated the basic principles of flight: lift, drag, weight, and thrust. In 1853, Cayley convinced his coachman to climb aboard a glider and soar above the English countryside; he became the first human being to fly and survive unscathed. Fifty years later, two American bicycle manufacturers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, ushered in the era of powered aviation with Orville's 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.

The rest is history. Biplanes, the Red Baron, mail planes, Lindbergh, World War II bombers, jet planes, commercial airliners, the Concorde, the space shuttle. Decade by decade, planes grew bigger and faster until routine flight became about as adventurous as a bus ride across Kansas.

But even as aeronautical innovations accelerated, a small core of purists were determined to recapture the visceral sensation of birdlike flight. In the early seventies, aviation throwbacks would haul their rudimentary hang gliders up some remote hillock and leap off. Crashes were common; tinkering with new designs, habitual.

In 1975, a 32-year-old glider pilot named John Moody attached a ten-horsepower, two-stroke Chrysler motor onto his glider, the Icarus II. A year later, he flew it at the Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In Convention, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, introducing the world to ultralight flying. In early 1980, Dick Eipper, founder of San Diego–based glider manufacturer Quicksilver, began selling the first commercially successful fixed-wing ultralight kit, for $2,995. Three years later, the powered parachute (PPC), a twin-engine version powered by two counter-rotating propellers, made its debut at the Sun 'n Fun air show, in Lakeland, Florida. It was the rebirth of adventure flying: retro, counterculture, seat-of-the-pants.

"They were renegades back then, and I guess we still are," says Scott Wilcox, veteran pilot and editor-in-chief of Ultralight Flying!, a 29-year-old publication based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not far from Lookout Mountain, one of the original hang-glider hills. "Ultralight flying isn't about transportation; it's about the magic of pure, simple flight."

Today there are more than 15,000 ultralight pilots and over 100 ultralight manufacturers in the U.S. Defined by the FAA as an aircraft that weighs less than 254 pounds and carries no more than five gallons of gas, modern ultralights fall into six different categories: fixed-winged aircraft that resemble stripped-down versions of conventional small airplanes; trikes, which have a hang-glider-type wing with a carriage for engine and pilot; motorized hang gliders; powered paragliders (PPGs), in which the engine and caged propeller are mounted on a backpack and connected by cords to a parachute; gyrocopters; and the go-cart-like PPCs. Although regulated by the FAA, ultralighting does not require a pilot's license. For the price of a used car, you can buy your own flying machine and soar away.

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