Got It All Down, Yet?

By ANN Correspondent John Ballantyne

The official FAA seminar explaining Sport Pilot and Light Sport Aircraft is playing to a packed house at Oshkosh this week. And the FAA was well prepared. Moderating the program was FAA Sport Pilot Manager, Sue Gardner. Her onstage team included FAA's Scott Sedgwick, who talked about Light Sport Aircraft airworthiness; Bill O'Brien, charged with explaining Light Sport Aircraft maintenance and repair; and Marty Weaver, Sport Pilot Branch Manager.

The FAA's Gardner proudly reported that the 474 page final rule has been simplified to a mere 60 pages. The smaller version is on the FAA Sport Pilot web page as of Wednesday morning, she said.

Gardner and the others used a Power Point program to walk through the parameters of Light Sport Aircraft, privileges of Sport Pilots, Sport Pilot Instructors and Examiners, Repairmen and Maintenance programs and so on. And on. And on. Glassy-eyed participants began to gasp for air as the details piled upon details. Upon details…

Will the FAA ever get a really simplified description of Sport pilot and Light Sport Aircraft?

Nope.

These rules are very complicated. FAA charts and presentations are probably as good as the explanation will ever get. Aviation advocates promise they'll will continue to create improved presentations, but it will never get easy. Why? Because there are just too many words for those with anything less than total recall.

So, how can you get your arms around this rule?

Forget trying to learn it all.

Instead, focus very specifically on finding what applies to you. For example, a private pilot who wants to fly a Light Sport Aircraft without an FAA medical should ignore everything else. The FAA charts and organizational materials boil it down pretty well, really. An ultralight pilot who wants to continue to fly his Quicksilver, say, should focus exclusively on that transition process alone.

There is no way for a recreation pilot to learn the whole rule, partly because of the length of the rule, and partly because fuzzy areas that required FAA interpretation or, simply, have no clarity even within FAA, yet. Use the KISS approach.

FMI www.faa.gov/avr/afs/sportpilot