terrafugia

[pip bip]

you might see them overhead soonish.

[OPPOsaurus WRX]

@pip-bip wow this is pretty cool. I can crashed into from left right back front and from above now too.

[BicycleBuck]

@pip-bip

Designated as a Light-Sport Aircraft. That does two things: lowers the barrier of entry for new pilots; and puts limitations on the aircraft and its use.

Sport Pilots can fly this thing, but are limited in several ways, from the airspace they can operate in to the times that they are allowed to fly. More advanced pilots don't have the restrictions, but the aircraft has to be appropriately equipped with lights for night flying, transponders and radios for certain airspaces, etc.

What gets me about the plane, is the limited payload. The "useful load" includes fuel. Light-sport aircraft are limited to 18 gallons of fuel, so I'm not sure why they are listing 20+ for their aircraft. Either way, 20 gallons of fuel weighs 120 lbs. Subtract that from the useful load and you're left with 340 lbs. for pilot, passenger and luggage. This is a problem.
At that weight limit, my son and I could fly together - as long as we didn't take any baggage and didn't quite fill up the tank.

I ran into this problem during my check ride. The examiner is a BIG guy. I warned the school before my check ride to leave off 14 gallons of fuel (fill it to the "tabs", or 18 gallons per wing instead of 25). They didn't and we had to drain fuel so we weren't overweight at take-off.

That's under ideal conditions. Lower the air pressure or increase the ambient temperature and the useful load goes down.

The Cessna 150, a popular training aircraft, has similar limitations. It's great when the instructor and student are both relatively svelt people, but my instructor and I had to make sure the tanks weren't full and the conditions were acceptable before we flew in that aircraft. Less fuel limited the range, so that plane was fine for practicing maneuvers but required extra vigilance when going cross-country.

Despite the limitations, I'm glad to see that someone is making progress in this arena. People aren't going to be flying to work anytime soon and certainly not in this car/aircraft. But it's neat to think about driving to the nearest airfield, flying a couple of hours away, then driving from the destination airfield to your final stop.

[pip bip]

@bicyclebuck cheers for that info.