Aerial Maneuvers: Piloting an Ultralight Aircraft

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Outside Magazine, May 2004

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Aerial Maneuvers (cont.)

BECAUSE OF THEIR unique ability to fly low and slow, ultralights offer pilots an unparalleled proximity to the avian world. In 1982, ultralight pioneer Tracy Knauss filmed the endangered Peruvian condor for ABC Sports' The American Sportsman series, setting a precedent for ultralight-assisted wildlife research. In 1988, an organization called Operation Migration began using ultralights to teach flight routes to Canada geese; for the past four years, it's been raising and training flocks of endangered whooping crane hatchlings to follow safe migratory paths.

Certainly the most poignant and widely acclaimed example of the use of ultralights is the 2003 documentary film Winged Migration, by French director Jacques Perrin. Using ultralights, Perrin and his crew of 18 pilots and dozens of cinematographers flew in formation with bar-headed and greylag geese, red-crowned cranes, white storks, and two dozen other species on their astounding thousand-mile global journeys. Taking advantage of birds' ability to imprint on their human "parents," Perrin's team of ornithologists spent a year breeding, raising, and training the chicks to tolerate close-quarters filming, and three years shooting the documentary. The result is the most intimate portrait of avian flight captured on film. It makes you want to fly. It made me want to fly.

Day three at SkyTrails Ranch, and I'm drifting through the sky at 1,000 feet AGL. This morning I practiced flybys: cruising over the LZ and attempting to hold the PPC level at various elevations. First 100 feet, then 50 feet, then 40, then 20. In the early afternoon I practiced touch-taxi-and-go landings, in which you graze the earth, kite your chute, then rocket right back into the sky. I reduced prop RPMs on each landing, finally alighting with the engine at a low idle.

Now for the final test: an "emergency" landing with the engine turned off.

"Mark, this is Frederick. Are you ready?" I'm not, but I say I am.

"All right, anytime you want."

I reach my arm out, place my fingers on the engine-off switch, and hesitate.

The PPC's engine is needed only for propulsion. Without the engine, the PPC will float back to earth at half the rate of an ordinary parachutist, practically landing itself. I know this intellectually, but that doesn't mean squat. It seems like unshakable common sense to believe that when an aircraft's engines go, everybody dies. For a split second, ugly scenes try to squeeze into my brain: planes nosediving, twirling, horrific screeching, explosions on impact.

I hit the switch. The engine sputters, the propeller slows to a click. Silence.

My heart jumps when I find that I am not falling out of the sky. I have tipped slightly downward and am gradually, gracefully descending. The experience is so viscerally thrilling, so primeval and satisfying, a huge laugh of relief and joy escapes from my chest. I float back to earth as calm as a feather.

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